It’s more than honey production—beekeeping blends science, hands-on skill, and problem-solving while supporting the environment.
Taking care of honeybees is a very challenging and rewarding hobby that impacts more than just yourself. Honeybees contribute to our environment in a positive way and have a direct impact locally.
Your neighbors may not realize it, but a beehive placed in your neighborhood will make a positive change in their yards.
Unfortunately, many beekeepers who start a hive will stop caring for bees within 2 or 3 years. This is due to a variety of reasons, but the vast majority of beekeepers who quit do so because they didn’t realize what is involved.
It’s better to take a little bit of time to learn what is involved with beekeeping, including the historical evolution and practices of bee keeping, in order to find out if beekeeping is right for you. It certainly isn’t for everyone, but if it is for you, you’ll love it!
Beekeeping is rewarding but demanding, requiring ongoing learning, seasonal management, and realistic expectations.
Healthy colonies depend on active involvement, critical thinking, and adapting methods to your goals, location, and abilities.
Table of Contents
Introduction to Beekeeping What is Beekeeping? Brief History of Beekeeping Bees Aren't Bluebirds Understanding Honey Bees Social Castes and Roles More Than Honey Science in Beekeeping Art in Beekeeping The Dark Side Of Beekeeping How Much Time Does Beekeeping Take? Beekeeping Equipment: Hives Are Heavy Critical Thinking Is Key To Beekeeping Do What Works For You
Introduction to Beekeeping
What is Beekeeping?
Beekeeping, also known as apiculture, is the fascinating practice of maintaining colonies of honey bees and other bees for their honey and other valuable products. It involves the care and management of these industrious insects, ensuring they have a suitable environment, proper nutrition, and necessary health care. Beekeepers use specialized equipment, such as beekeeping suits, veils, and gloves, to protect themselves from stings and to handle the bees safely. The world of beekeeping is rich with unique tools and techniques, from hive tools to various hive styles like the Langstroth hives and horizontal top bar hives, each serving a specific purpose in the art of apiculture.
Brief History of Beekeeping
The history of beekeeping is as sweet as honey itself, dating back thousands of years. The earliest evidence of beekeeping comes from ancient Egypt, where bees were kept in clay hives around 2500 BCE. The practice spread throughout the ancient world, with the Greeks and Romans keeping bees for their honey and wax. In the Middle Ages, beekeeping became a common practice in Europe, where bees were kept in wooden hives. Fast forward to today, and beekeeping is a global practice, with millions of beekeepers tending to their hives for honey, wax, and other products. The evolution of beekeeping has seen the development of various hive styles and beekeeping equipment, making it a dynamic and ever-evolving field.
Bees Aren't Bluebirds
When we teach classes, we like to make the analogy about birds and bees. Not that analogy… we tell students that taking care of bees isn’t like taking care of birds. With birds, you can just put out a birdhouse in a place that they like, and they will take care of themselves. Sometimes the birds will be there; sometimes they won’t, but they will be ok.
Bees, on the other hand, can’t be placed in a box and left to take care of themselves. Honey bees are really great at taking care of themselves day-to-day, but throughout the course of the year, their demands change. Sometimes they need more room to grow, and sometimes they need less room. The beekeeper’s responsibility is to manage the bees through the seasons, making sure they have the resources they need, including food when necessary, a queen, the proper entrance size, etc.… Experienced beekeepers adapt their management techniques based on their familiarity with bee behavior.
Let’s say, for example, you want to take care of a hive or two in your backyard, which is no big deal. You aren’t in it for the honey; you think it’s cool and want to help the environment. A noble reason. You buy some bees, a hive, watch some YouTube videos, and now you have a couple of honey bee colonies doing their thing day in and day out.
Honey isn’t really your thing, so you aren’t concerned about adding additional honey boxes because you aren’t going to harvest it. This is great until the population of bees quadruples during the spring (like it does every year) and the colony swarms onto the swing set in your neighbor’s yard.
They hang out there for a couple of days and then move off. But then it happens again.
Or maybe the swarm of bees starts building a new colony in the soffit of a nearby house.
Beekeepers want to avoid these types of situations for many reasons, but primarily because you want to be a good neighbor. If the hives were out in the country, this wouldn’t be a big deal.
But through good management techniques taught in beginner classes, you’ll be able to reduce the chance of this ever happening.
Understanding Honey Bees
Social Castes and Roles
Honey bees are social insects that live in highly organized colonies, each with a complex social hierarchy. There are three main social castes in a honey bee colony: the queen bee, the worker bees, and the drones. The queen bee, the largest bee in the colony, is the heart of the hive, responsible for laying eggs and producing pheromones that regulate the behavior of the other bees. Her primary role is to ensure the colony’s growth and survival by laying thousands of eggs.
Worker bees, the female bees, are the backbone of the colony, performing a variety of essential tasks. These industrious bees forage for nectar and pollen, care for the young, build and maintain the hive, and defend the colony from predators. Their roles change as they age, starting as nurse bees caring for the larvae and eventually becoming foragers venturing out to collect food.
Drones, the male bees, have a singular purpose: to mate with the queen bee. Unlike worker bees, drones do not have stingers and do not gather food or defend the colony. Their sole mission is to ensure the continuation of the hive’s genetic line, and they die shortly after mating.
The intricate social structure of a honey bee colony is a marvel of nature, with each bee playing a vital role in the hive’s survival and success. Understanding these roles and the dynamics within the colony is key to successful beekeeping, allowing beekeepers to manage their hives effectively and ensure the health and productivity of their bees.
More Than Honey
One of the best parts of beekeeping is that it covers a wide variety of topics, topics that can typically appeal to everyone. Woodworking, nature, engineering, sweat-equity, food, working with your hands, geometry, danger, bugs, homesteading, working alone, astronomy, a little “cowboying” (not a word), meteorology, and many more appealing parts of beekeeping.
If you are the type of person who likes to explore and really dive deep into a topic, then beekeeping is for you. Beekeeping is one of those hobbies that you can engulf yourself in it and pursue a wide variety of fields, all beekeeping-related. It’s not just about honey. Worker bees play a crucial role in honey production, taking on responsibilities such as foraging for nectar, feeding larvae, and ultimately producing and storing honey.
Science in Beekeeping
Beekeeping is definitely a science, and researchers spend their entire careers studying a single aspect of how honey bees work. You don’t need to have been an AP Bio genius to be a good beekeeper, but if you enjoy a little of the why behind the what, then beekeeping may be for you.
It is really fascinating to understand how you can create a situation inside a beehive and predict how a colony of bees is going to react to it. Beekeepers must also manage significant pests like the varroa mite to maintain hive health and prevent colony collapse disorder.
For example, if you want to turn one colony into two, you can take some bees, eggs, honey, and pollen (but not the old queen) and move them into a new box right next to the old one.
The new box will panic and start raising its own queen from an egg within a few hours. It’s incredible that they can do this and fascinating that you can create a situation for them to do it.
Art in Beekeeping
The bees operate according to sciences, and even though they are incredible at making comb and collecting pollen into a mosaic of colors, they aren’t really artists. The art of beekeeping is more about the beekeeper than the bees. Being able to read your colony of bees is a learned skill and makes beekeeping easier.
This may seem strange to the average person because they just seem like a bunch of bugs. However, it doesn’t take long for beekeepers to learn the different personalities of their colonies. Some colonies are a little meaner than others.
Taking care of a colony of bees over months helps beekeepers to learn this art. Beekeepers will learn how to slowly open a hive so as to not disrupt them and how the sound of their buzz changes as they grow tired of being messed with. A hive tool is essential for tasks such as scraping off burr-comb and separating frames. Lighting a bee smoker and using it correctly with your bees is definitely a learned skill.
The Dark Side Of Beekeeping
When talking with beginners, we like to shoot straight with them and set their expectations appropriately. The first year of beekeeping is the toughest, both for the bees and the beekeeper. The beekeeper is learning a new hobby that is more like farming; it’s a hobby that is active every day of the year. Beekeepers do not have to do something daily or even weekly, but the bees are always working.
Colonies don’t always make it. In our Beekeeping for Beginners post, I wrote about how this is the worst part of beekeeping. It’s discouraging to walk up to a hive you thought was doing really well, only to find out something has killed them. There are probably a half dozen common causes for a hive to die; some are obvious, some are not. It’s disappointing to feel like you are doing everything right, and it still doesn’t work out. That is part of beekeeping, unfortunately.
This chart shows the average losses over the winter for backyard beekeepers. A loss is a colony that has died. You can see what the average has been over the years. It fluctuates each year, but around 4 out of 10 hives don’t survive the year.
Beekeepers who quit after a year or two don’t expect this to happen. They get so discouraged by it and feel like they are doing a poor job.
The wax moth is another pest that can cause significant damage to honeycombs, particularly affecting weak colonies. There are definitely some good practices to minimize colony deaths, but it is normal in our modern beekeeping. The way that beekeepers deal with this is by crying.
Not really. They keep more than one hive so that the chances of going down to zero hives are very low. The sweet spot is about 5 or 6 hives, but at least two. We aren’t getting into it here, but it’s straightforward to turn one colony into two or three each year.
Therefore, if you have two hives and one dies, you can turn the surviving colony into two.
Maybe this isn’t the best way to encourage people to get into beekeeping, but as a company, we focus on education and want students to be as prepared as they can be to take care of bees. Lying to them about how easy it is isn’t what we do.
The good news is it gets much easier after the 1st and 2nd years. Not because the bees are better but because the beekeeper is better.
How Much Time Does Beekeeping Take?
The amount of time necessary to be a successful backyard beekeeper will vary depending on where you live and how many hives you have. For most parts of the country, the daily temperatures in the winter drop below 50°F for several months of the year. During these months, the bees do not fly, and their populations are very low. This is the offseason for beekeepers, and there isn’t that much to do with the actual bees. Most of the time spent “on bee stuff” during the winter is spent reading, making plans for next year, etc…
During the spring and summer, however, there is much to do. We compare it to gardening and feel like it is a pretty good analogy. There is actually a little more weekly work to do in taking care of a garden than a beehive. During the spring and summer, gardens have grown quickly, and there are some weekly and monthly tasks to do, like watering, pulling weeds, and harvesting. As summer fades, these chores start to taper off, and there isn’t much to do.
Bees follow this same pattern and their activities match the seasons. Every spring the bees want to do the same thing, forage for food, build comb, and swarm. Every fall, they want the same thing: reduce the population size and get ready for winter. In the big picture, you see that there are more responsibilities during the warm months and less during the winter.
The honey harvest is a key activity during the warm months, and certain hive configurations, like the AZ Hive, can streamline the process by integrating with honey houses.
How much time then does it really take? During the warm months, it is good to check in on the colony every 1-2 weeks for a first or 2nd-year beekeeper. Closer to 2 weeks is better than weekly, and it’s not recommended to open the hive daily.
Typical tasks when visiting the hives are refilling sugar syrup jars, checking on the queen's progress, and adjusting frames. Sometimes, you only need 5 minutes to refill the sugar syrup and make sure the bees are still there.
Other times, you’ll spend about 20 minutes a hive looking through frames. So every 7-14 days, you might spend 2 hours doing some beekeeping activities with 2 hives. Beekeepers tend to spend more than that, however, because it’s fun.
Beekeeping Equipment: Hives Are Heavy
You might think, what do muscles have to do with taking care of bees? Everyone knows that bees are incredibly industrious and work day in and day out. As a result of this, they can store a lot of honey inside their colony.
The honey is very heavy for how much room it actually takes up in the hive. Because of this, the beekeeping equipment can be cumbersome. Almost too heavy at times.
Some hives have become popular as alternatives to the standard Langstroth hive most beekeepers use (the white boxes stacked on each other). These other hives are horizontally designed, so a beekeeper never has to lift a heavy box. It is important to select a hive style that is common in your area for easier equipment access and support.
The part that requires some oomph is when you keep bees in a traditional Langstroth hive, and it has 4 boxes stacked up. To get to the 3rd box, the 4th box needs to be removed. These boxes, when full of honey, can we 40lbs+. It’s not so much it’s impossible, but it is something to consider.
Worried about the weight, consider 8 frame medium beekeeping kits, a top bar hive, or a horizontal Langstroth hive. All are great options.
Critical Thinking Is Key To Beekeeping
I remember walking into a beekeeping meeting for our local club for the first time in 2012, not having any idea of what I was getting into. It turns out that I loved it and now run our business, Foxhound Bee Company, full-time.
One of the first takeaways from that meeting is that beekeepers have an opinion (shocker, right). It seems that every beekeeper does things differently. They all have their own way of doing things and that way is the best way.
It wasn’t until about a year later that I realized everyone has their own perspectives because beekeepers have their own goals and abilities.
The beekeeper who doesn’t care about honey is going to manage their hives differently than the beekeeper who wants to get every last drop of honey they can from their bees.
A nucleus hive, or nuc, is a smaller beehive option that makes it easier to establish a colony.
Similarly, the beekeeper who is retired and has a workshop is going to build their own custom feeder that works great for them. If you don’t know how to hammer from a nail, you aren’t going to use that type of feeder because you aren’t going to build it.
You are going to use a feeder that is best for you, one you can just buy. The same goes for the beekeeper who can lift 100lbs without even thinking about it.
They are going to use different equipment than the one who has a bad back or can’t lift a big watermelon alone.
Do What Works For You
Beekeeping is very local and personal. Not all bee colonies operate the same way, and not all beekeepers have the same motivation. What works for another beekeeper may not work for you. It’s important to be a critical thinker when working with bees. If you are a systematic person who likes to problem solve, then beekeeping is for you. If you love nature and see the special side of bees and how important they are to us, then beekeeping is for you.
Native bees also play a crucial role in the pollination ecosystem, seeding over 90% of flowering plants and contributing to 30% of human food sources. They often compete with domestic honey bees for resources, especially in areas without indigenous honey bees.
We ran a poll on our Facebook page asking our followers, “What kind of person makes a good beekeeper?”. By far, the most popular submission was something related to critical thinking and being able to observe. I’ve said it from the 1st year I started taking care of bees: beekeepers are very innovative people who enjoy solving problems. Beekeepers are always seeing an issue and trying to solve it themselves. There are so many beekeeping inventions out there that are made to help with little problems, and it’s amazing to see that ingenuity in people.
Adam Hickman owns Foxhound Bee Company and is a certified EAS Master Beekeeper. Before ever selling a box through Foxhound Bee Company, Adam wrote beekeeping blogs for education. Adam regularly teaches beekeeping classes through Foxhound Bee Co and also through his local beekeeping club.