Beekeeping

Beekeeping, or apiculture (from the Latin apis, meaning "bee"), is one of the oldest forms of food production known in human culture, with evidence of domestic beekeeping appearing in artwork produced as early as 3000 BCE in ancient Egypt. Over centuries of practice and refinement, beekeeping has become a modern hobby and occupation, with thousands of practitioners worldwide raising bees in rural, suburban, and even urban environments to harvest honey, honeycomb, royal jelly, and other products.

Honeybees of the genus Apis have a wide distribution, with species found in Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia. Millennia before humans learned to keep bee colonies, gatherers scoured the landscape and harvested honey and honeycomb from feral colonies, a process often called "honey hunting." Cave paintings dating from the Upper Paleolithic era depict humans gathering honey from wild colonies.

Historians are uncertain where or when beekeeping was first invented, but it is known that beekeeping was regularly practiced in Egypt as early as the First Dynasty (3100-2890 BCE), and artwork from the Old Kingdom period (2686-2181 BCE) clearly shows workers using smoke to pacify bees in their colonies before removing honeycomb.

Egyptian beekeepers generally kept their bees in woven or clay vessels stacked on top of one another. Stacks of this kind could be used to house more than four hundred hives of bees in a single bee farm. Beekeepers in ancient Rome developed the practice of using hollow cork or wooden crates to house bees and thus largely influenced the modern practices used in North America and Europe.

Honeybees, which are not native to the Americas, were introduced by European colonists and traders. By the seventeenth century, writings from North America indicate that bee colonies had been established in the New World and that many bees had escaped the confines of their bee farms to establish wild populations.

In 1852, Philadelphia resident Lorenzo Langstroth produced a patent for a commercial beehive that became the global standard over subsequent generations. Langstroth's book A Practical Treatise on the Hive and the Honeybee (1857) became the most commonly used guide on bees and beekeeping for generations and helped greatly to spread beekeeping as a hobby.

Beekeeping was largely a rural practice until the 1980s, when an urban beekeeping trend first spread through North America and Europe. Since that time, thousands of amateur beekeepers have engaged in the hobby in cities and suburbs, influencing changes in beekeeping regulations at the state and municipal levels. During this period, a variety of companies began offering beekeeping kits designed to provide the amateur beekeeper with the basic equipment and instructions to begin keeping bees for fun and for profit.

The decline of the wild honeybee population in North America since the 1980s has increased interest in beekeeping both as a hobby and as an agricultural endeavor. Beekeeping organizations have placed pressure on state and local governments to endorse, protect, and promote beekeeping in an effort to supplement wild populations and, in some cases, to reinvigorate wild bee populations across the continent.

Housing and Storage

Two basic types of beehives or apiaries are used by most hobbyist beekeepers:

• Langstroth or "movable frame" apiary, which opens on the top and has adjustable frames to allow access to the bees and their products. Frames typically feature prefabricated hexagonal patterns onto which the bees construct the honeycombs.
• Top-bar apiary, which is often considered to provide a more naturalistic setting, designed to encourage comb building along bars across the top of the hive. Top-bar hives are not as productive because the honeycombs are not returned to the hive after the extraction, but they are far easier to construct and maintain because of their simple design.

Clothing and Safety Gear

• Leather or heavy cloth gloves
• Hat with an attached veil to protect the face and neck
• Thick, long-sleeved, light-colored coverings for the torso, arms, and legs
• Cloth or fine mesh nets for collecting bees and controlling swarms

Honey Harvesting

• Brush and scraper for removing honeycomb
• Honey extraction container
• Mesh strainers and honey storage containers
• Strong, short knife for prying apart fused honeycomb

Home Supplies

• Wooden fencing at least six feet in height (required for populated areas)
• A clean source of water near each beehive for hydration
• Nearby flowers and other plantings to encourage pollination and for food

Techniques

Beekeeping is a seasonal activity, and the daily activities involved vary from month to month. In temperate areas, bees tend to hibernate during the winter season, and beekeepers must utilize special methods to prepare their hives for the hibernation period. In the spring, other activities are used to start hive production, which may include introducing new queens or feeding a different type of food to the hive.

New colonies of bees are generally established in the late winter or early spring. Shipments containing newly mated queens and a few thousand workers should be purchased before the season begins. Once the bees arrive, they should be fed immediately with a 50 percent solution of sugar water and should be introduced to their hive within forty-eight hours of arrival.

An alternative technique is to purchase a nucleus, or "nuc," colony, which contains a queen, workers, and brood (bee eggs, young, and larvae) at various stages of development. Nuc colonies are smaller than the full-sized colonies that many beekeepers purchase, but they expand rapidly because of the brood contained within the shipment. Many beekeepers consider nuc colonies to be more productive, and therefore they are often more expensive to purchase.

Handling the bees in a hive is generally accomplished with a smoker, which is a device that produces and applies smoke through a nozzle. Various types of fuels are used to produce smoke, including pine needles and other woods. The smoke masks the alarm pheromones produced by worker bees when they sense danger and, in this way, helps to calm the colony and prevent them from attacking the beekeeper. In addition, the presence of smoke within the hive initiates a feeding response in the bees, which also prevents them from reacting strongly to intruders. Smokers are constructed in such a way that the smoke emerges from the nozzle in a cooled state, thereby reducing potential harm to the bees.

Once a hive starts producing honey, the beekeeper needs to collect and process honey several times during each season. This process requires a scraping tool, known generally as a "hive tool," and containers to store and sort the honeycomb and honey. Honey extracting machines can also be purchased and greatly increase the efficiency of harvesting, allowing a beekeeper to process the honey from multiple honeycombs simultaneously.

Trends

Beekeeping has remained relatively similar to the practices developed in the nineteenth century, though hundreds of different methods and techniques for beekeeping have been developed around the world and modern beekeepers can utilize many different methods when caring for their hives.

Urban and suburban beekeeping took off in response to colony collapse disorder. Rooftop apiaries have gained traction as urban bees forage in vacant lots, among other areas.

One newer trend in beekeeping in the proliferation of "natural" beekeeping techniques, which became popular in the 1980s as urban and suburban beekeeping increased in popularity. Those who follow "natural" beekeeping practices attempt to facilitate the natural development of their bee colonies and resist feeding the bees or applying chemicals, relying instead on the bees' innate foraging and defensive capabilities. Certain companies manufacture hives for the natural beekeeping process, which are generally designed after the hanging hive design still used in Africa and many other parts of the world.

Hives featuring observation windows became popular. Other innovations on traditional hives have included hot hives designed to eradicate parasitic mites with heat, not pesticides, and Flow Hives, in which honey is extracted through a crank-and-channel system. Sensors can be applied to take hive measurements and track data over time, and certain mobile applications help beekeepers track interactions with their hives.

In an era of widespread bee declines, hive thefts have become another problem facing beekeepers.

Beekeeping for Fun vs. Profit

Hobbyist beekeepers generally raise bees for enjoyment, similar to the way that many individuals plant and maintain gardens. The honey and other products harvested from the bees during the year may be consumed by the beekeeper's family and friends or given away as gifts.

A healthy beehive can produce between thirty to one hundred pounds of honey in a single season, providing beekeepers with a bounty that must be packaged and distributed. For this reason, many individuals use beekeeping as a sideline to obtain extra income, selling honey to local stores or through a home business. In 2019, consumers in the United States paid an average of $7.50 for a pound of honey. By altering the types of flowers available to a colony, beekeepers can produce specialized types of honey, including buckwheat honey and fireweed honey, which can sell for a higher price at a local market. To transition from beekeeping as a hobby to beekeeping as a business, it is advisable to find and read books written about beekeeping for profit.

Learning More

Organizations

American Beekeeping Federation <https://www.abfnet.org>

Bee Informed <https://beeinformed.org>

HoneyLove Urban Beekeepers <http://honeylove.org>

Preservation Beekeeping Council <https://preservationbeekeeping.com>

Books

Belknap, Cindy. The Complete Guide to Beekeeping for Fun and Profit. Ocala, FL: Atlantic, 2010. Print.

Conrad, Ross. Natural Beekeeping: Organic Approaches to Modern Apiculture. White River Junction, NH: Chelsea Green, 2007. Print.

Crane, Eva. The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting. New York: Routledge, 1999. Print.

Brown, Ron. Beekeeping: A Seasonal Guide. London: Batsford, 2011. Print.

DeVito, Dominique. Beekeeping: A Primer on Starting and Keeping a Hive. New York: Sterling, 2012. Print.

Flottum, Kim. The Backyard Beekeeper. Minneapolis: Quarry, 2010. Print.

Flottum, Kim. Better Beekeeping. Minneapolis: Quarry, 2011. Print.

Jones, Richard. Beekeeping as a Business. London: Intl. Bee Research Assn., 1999. Print.