Packer - Beekeeping

Beekeeping

A Practical Beekeeping Guide to Keeping & Managing Bees Properly

Bowe Packer

Publishers Notes

Disclaimer

This publication is intended to provide helpful and informative material and help to get you off to a great start. Please understand, it is not intended to cover every single aspect about beekeeping. You will without a doubt run into certain things that I did not. This is the natural process of life.

However, with that said, I did my very best to cover all the aspect of this particular endeavor and I hope you will see that in the chapters of this book.

I, the author and publisher specifically disclaim all responsibility for any liability, loss or risk, personal or otherwise, which is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, from the use or application of any contents of this book.

Any and all product names referenced within this book are the trademarks of their respective owners. None of these owners have sponsored, authorized, endorsed, or approved this book.

Always read all information provided by the manufacturers product labels before using their products. The author and publisher are not responsible for claims made by manufacturers.

Kindle Edition 2013

Manufactured in the United States of America

Dedication

I dedicate this book to all those people out there who remind us of the things we have forgotten about ourselves.

And this holds especially true of my beautiful and amazing wife, Alma. She is the one woman who has the most amazing talent to let me grow and love the things about myself that I have not fully accepted.

I cherish the love she has for me when I may not know how to love myself.

May we all have this kind of beautiful soul in our life.

Sent from LOVE,

Sunshine In My Soul

Part I: All About Bees

So youre looking to get started as a beekeeper. You want to learn everything you can about bees so that not only will you have an enjoyable hobby and pastime for a long time to come, but youll have happy bees and a lot of honey right? Well this book is going to get you started in the right direction. Well tell you all about what you need to be safe and successful in your bee keeping. Well also tell you how to keep your friends, family and neighbors safe while youre at it.

Chapter 1- A Complete History of Bees

You probably know why bees are important to our ecosystem right? You know that bees pollinate flowers and nearly everything else in our world. One single bee can actually pollinate thousands of flowers and hundreds of miles because they can and will fly anywhere. This is what gives us such excellent springtime flowers and what helps to improve production of essentially all crops. Of course the honey is pretty good too right?

Well what you may not have known is that honey isnt the only thing that bees produce. They actually produce a type of jelly which can improve food supplements. They also produce beeswax which is used in lotions, candles and nearly anything else you can imagine because of its healing abilities on the skin. It can even be used for a large variety of craft projects. But all of this tells us nothing about the history of bees.

It is believed through evolution that bees started out as wasps. Tracing back their genealogy (that means their family tree) we find the Crabronidae wasps in prehistoric times. These were very predatory bugs and would actually eat other insects. For millions of years nothing really changed for these bees which are something we should keep in mind. It means that the bees really didnt need to change much to keep up with modern society and to survive throughout those millions of years.

In modern times however we call bees a member of the Apidae family. One genus that is used more frequently with beekeepers is Apis and this is broken down into three smaller categories: open-nesting species, single-come species and cavity-nesting species. If youre going to start beekeeping the most common one that you are likely raising will be Apis Mellifera which is the third type of these bees.

So why do bees pollinate? Why are they so good at it? These are likely questions that youre asking yourself. Well the bees pollinate almost entirely by accident and its very much related to why they are so good at it.

1. A bees body is covered in hair. If you look closely youll see these tiny hairs which are actually very sticky to the pollen in flowers. When the bee goes into the flower it picks up this pollen.
2. The body of a bee is stretched so that it can reach deep into flowers and pull out more of the pollen and nectar that is hidden deep in the center.
3. One colony needs a lot of pollen and nectar. This means that workers are responsible for doing a lot of work. Not only will they make honey all their lives but theyll also rear the larvae. Foragers will travel miles (more than 50 sometimes) in order to find flowers with enough pollen for their needs.
4. When a bee is out searching for pollen and nectar however, you may be surprised to notice that they work from only one species of flower at any given time.

Of course bees dont only collect pollen on their body, they have little pollen baskets on their legs (at least thats what humans call them) which hold even more pollen to carry it back to the hive.

Chapter 2- Understanding The Keeping of Bees

Beekeepers havent been around as long as bees of course. It does seem however that bee colonies started in ancient cultures (though for us they started in England in a period before the American War of Independence). They were transported to Virginia all the way back in 1622 and have likely been here ever since. It wasnt that beekeeping was new; it was simply new to the colonies and therefore only needed to be tweaked to make it work in the colonies.

Beehives were set up throughout Virginia and then into Massachusetts from 1629 to 1634. They were then expanded into Pennsylvania and New York. These colonies actually used ancient methods of containing the bees which were known as skeps. These hand-made, dome-shaped hives had only a few exits so the bees were only able to travel certain ways. In order to collect from the hive it needed to be destroyed and the hive would then be destroyed as well.

Once the hive was destroyed a brand new colony needed to be created and that definitely wasnt very easy for beekeepers to accomplish. Still this was all they knew until approximately 1852 when L.L. Langstroth created a frame hive. This is now the standard in beekeeping because it allows for the collection of honey and beeswax without having to destroy the hive or the bees themselves to do it. Before this amazing invention there were only three ways to get honey from a beehive:

1. Install caps into the beehive so that wax cells and honey would be put into the false cap which could then be removed to extract any product.
2. Use skeps to hold the bees and all of their product. When it was time for harvest burning sulfur would kill the bees and the n the skep could be pulled apart to reach the honey and wax.
3. Trees where bees lived could be cut down so that the honey and wax could easily be reached but the bees had to be killed in order to do it.

The new method created by Langstroth changed everything. It allowed beekeepers to get the honey without destroying the bees so they could keep producing over and over again. This method utilized tin smokers to help beekeepers keep an eye on their bees and monitor for any disease or problems. One of those problems was queen-less hives.

Messrs. Alley, Carrey and Pratt found out how to create queen bees that could be transported to other hives so those hives would produce. A hive without a queen was very restless and would not work. It therefore became essential to have a way of producing queen bees to these hives in the event that the queen died off.