Andrew Forrest - Beekeeping: Backyard Beekeeping: Essential Beginners Guide to Build and Care For Your First Bee Colony and Make Delicious Natural Honey From Your Own Garden

Beekeeping

( Backyard Beekeeping )

Essential Beginners Guide to Build and Care

For Your First Bee Colony and Make Delicious Natural Honey From Your Own Garden

Contents

Introduction

A beekeeper, also known as an apiarist, creates a system for honey bee collection. But contrary to popular belief, its not just honey that they get to harvest. Beekeepers can also harvest pollen, propolis, royal jelly, and beeswax. Beekeepers use hive products to aid in the pollination of crops. Aside from that, hive products are also known for their endless health benefits. Beekeepers can also breed bees to be sold to other beekeepers. A bee yard, or an apiary, is where bees are kept.

There are 140,000 beekeepers in the United States keeping 3.2 million beehives. American beekeepers produced 200 million pounds of honey a year. In addition, honey bees pollinate and make possible many of the fruits and vegetables that make up the American diet. In fact, the annual contribution of honey bees to crop pollination and production is over nine billion dollars.

Beekeepers earn substantial amount of money for keeping bees. It is a business that can be easily sustained by following the universal rules for satisfactory bee production. These rules will be discussed in detail in this book. Aside from honey production, keeping bees is also a good decision if you have a garden. Aside from harvesting honey and other hive products, your garden will also thrive with the aid of bees for pollination.

But to tell the truth, those are not the reasons why many beekeepers have kept bees. Most of them keep bees because they enjoy the outdoors. They enjoy helping a young colony grow in spring. They enjoy watching the bees make honey. They enjoy harvesting, bottling, and selling honey as well. They enjoy contributing to biodiversity and encouraging pollination.

Bee keeping is considered more than just a business; it is a hobby that you and your family can enjoy. Bee keeping can be a highly profitable and unique pastime when done properly.

If you raise animals or work with wood, grow a garden or have an entrepreneurial spirit, you might be a candidate for beekeeping. Raising a huge colony of bees can be pretty satisfying. Bees can double in number by the next spring when they are raised properly. An expert beekeeper can raise enough bees to be sold to other beekeepers.

Beekeeping is also a great complementary hobby if you work well with wood. If you are a wood hobbyist, then you can create your own honey super the collection mechanism for your beehive. You can customize it based on your preferences.

As a beginner, you would want to be as hands on as possible so you can be in tune with your honey bee production. It is also a very rewarding experience when you get to create your own frame. As mentioned above, beekeeping is very beneficial if you are growing a garden. The United States Department of Agriculture has pointed out how bee pollination is able to increase crop value by an additional of $15 billion dollars. This is particularly true for specialty crops like fruits, vegetables, berries, and nuts. The direct and indirect benefits of beekeeping have proven to be phenomenal.

Bees are very diligent workers. They are independent workers and require very little supervision. Once you have setup the initial requirements for beekeeping, you will only need at least half an hour every week for planning. Twice a year, you will need to spend more time with them for honey collecting. Other than that, you do not need to devote so much of your time to beekeeping.

But theres one thing that seem to keep people away from bee keeping the idea of getting stung. Bee sting is one of the main reasons why a lot of people are reluctant to start a beekeeping business, but the truth is, bees are gentle creatures, at least until they sense danger to their hive. You'd be surprised at how gentle they can be, and of the many places where you can keep bees. You do not need a very large place to store your honey supers. What is even more surprising, you can even keep your honey supers in your backyard. In this book, we'll go ahead and discuss the basics of backyard beekeeping. As an example, we'll set up ten bee hives from scratch--that is with packages of bees in the mail, just like what veteran beekeepers did when they were starting out.

We'll follow the progress of this bee yard, or apiary, as it matures and develops in to a full blown colony, so you will see what you can expect. This book can be your guide to starting your apiary. But before we begin, let's look at some other history of beekeeping so you can have a better appreciation as to how the science of beekeeping started.

For centuries, honey and fruit were mankind's only sweets. Therefore, bees and honey figured prominently in early societies. The Christian Bible is full of references to bees and honey. Beeswax was used in art, and a weatherproof cloth, rustproof metal, and make writing tablets.

There are several opinions as to when bees came to existence. According to some sources, bees were first known to exist 40 million years ago. However, there are claims that honey bee fossils were found and the fossilized remains dated back to as far as 150 million years ago.

According to the earliest records, humans started to consume honey 10,000 years ago. This was evidenced by the historical drawings in caves. In Spain, drawings of beekeeping practice date back to between 6,000 and 8,000 years ago. In Eastern Spain, you can find the Cuevas de la Araa (or the Spider Caves) whose rock art depicts an image of a person gathering honey from a tree. These groups of caves are discovered in Bicorp, Valencia by Jaime Gari i Poch, a local teacher. These rock art was among the Rock Art of the Iberian Mediterranean Basin of the World Heritage Site.

At first, people simply hunted bees in hollow trees or cave, and destroyed their nest to get the honey and beeswax. But by 2400 B.C., ancient Egyptians had learned to keep bees in clay pots, and probably did not kill their colonies at harvest time. Ancient Greeks and Romans kept bees. It was also at this time that fire and smoke were discovered. Beekeepers during the Niuserra dynasty were illustrated to be blowing smoke into the beehives while the honeycombs were removed. The honey they have collected were stored in earthen jars. Their philosophers wrote romantic, but biologically inaccurate, accounts of bees and their ways.

Rome maintained commercial apiaries in Spain. During the dark ages, there was little advancement in beekeeping. However, in monasteries--the only oasis of literacy at that time--bees were kept, honey was produced, beeswax candles were made, and the ancient bee text of the Greeks and Romans were preserved.

During the middle ages, beginning about 1500 years ago, beekeepers started cutting trees that contain bee nests and keeping the long sections as hives. At this time, the well-known straw skep appeared. During Europe's discovery of the Americas, honey bees followed shortly thereafter. We don't know when or where bees were introduced to North America, but by the 1640s they were well established along the eastern coast.

In 1682, an English clergyman, named George Wheler, documented the Greek hives he saw in one of his travels. The Greek hives became the basis for the creation of the hives today that features movable frames.