How to Raise Bees

Beekeeping is not for the faint of heart. Of course, with the right kind of protective clothing and tools it is quite safe once you get used to the fuzzy little guys. Beekeeping used to be about gathering honey. Now, with a huge shortage of honeybees, owners travel around the country, "renting out" their hives for crop pollination, proving bees are a very important part of our environment.

Instructions

1. Purchase the right kind of equipment for protecting yourself from bees. There are various types of suits for this, but they all basically cover your entire body and are elasticized at the wrists and ankles. The bee helmet, or hat, has netting to cover your face and zips onto the suit. You will also need leather gloves and boots for protection.

2. Buy a brood chamber and supers to start your hive. The brooding chamber is where the queen lays her eggs, which the workers feed and keep clean. The supers are frames with a hive-like, wax pattern on the bottom on which the workers will build honeycombs to hold the honey. Five is a good number of frames to start with.

3. Order your bees from a bee supplier. You will need a queen, workers and drones. The queen, who leaves the hive once in her life to mate, spends the rest of her life (two to three years) laying eggs. The workers do everything else, from feeding larvae, cleaning, guarding the hive and gathering nectar to make honey. Drones seem to serve only one purpose--mating, after which the queen kills him.

4. Feed your bees supplements in the spring to get them started. These include pollen supplements or sugar and water. These are sold at beekeeping supply stores, and will give them nourishment until the flowers and trees begin to bloom. Then the workers will go out and collect nectar to bring back and store in the supers and wax cells they have built.

5. Wear a protective suit and use a smoker when working with the bees. Smoke calms them down and stimulates the feeding instinct; it also blocks the smell of the danger pheromone given out by the guards. This will allow you to remove full supers and check the bees in the brooding chamber without exciting them. Use moss, rotten wood or other fuels in your smoker.

6. Replace your queen if she dies or leaves with a swarm. A healthy hive will swarm two or three times a summer, when the queen and half of the colony leaves. Buy a new queen or artificially start a new colony by taking a frame containing workers and larvae. The workers will feed a nutrient-rich food to chosen larvae to create a queen.

7. Remove honey-filled supers any time for honey extraction, removing debris or bees from the honeycomb. Replace supers with empty frames, where the honeybees will create wax cells with secretions from their bodies and fill them with honey. When the cells are full and have matured they are capped with wax by the bees for future use.

8. Cover your hive in the winter making sure you have left enough food for the bees until winter is over. The bees keep from freezing by forming a swarm around the queen in the lowest chamber. By shivering and moving constantly, they keep the temperature at approximately 80 degrees and will not freeze unless it is a particularly long or cold winter.

Resources

• Visit Bee Care and search for a complete guide to beekeeping.