1. Honey Bee Basics Archives - Page 2 of 2

Beekeeping Beginner’s Kit – Starting Your Journey

Beekeeping can be a fun and rewarding hobby, but it can also seem daunting for beginners. This guide will help you get started on the right foot, with advice on the best way to set up your apiary, how to get your bees, and what supplies you’ll need in your beekeeping beginner’s kit. Before you get started, there are a few things you need to know. Choose the Right Location for your Beehive The first step to starting beekeeping is to choose the right location for your hive. The best location for a hive is in an open area with plenty of sunlight and access to ...

Basic Beekeeping Vocabulary

Words you will learn in a backyard basic beekeeping course! Beekeeping is a fun and rewarding hobby, but it can seem confusing and overwhelming if you’re not familiar with the terminology. There are a lot of terms used in beekeeping. This can make it difficult to understand what is being said if you’re unfamiliar with the lingo. Definitions of Important Beekeeping Terms Even if you don’t plan on becoming a beekeeper, it’s still interesting to know about these creatures in beekeeping training courses. So, let’s get started! Apiary: A locat...

The Amazing Langstroth Hive

The Langstroth hive is a type of beehive that is named after its inventor, Reverend Lorenzo Langstroth. It is the most commonly used hive design in modern beekeeping, and it is characterized by its use of removable frames that hold the bees’ honeycombs in place. One advantage of the Langstroth hive is that it allows the beekeeper to easily inspect the hive and perform other hive management tasks, such as adding or removing frames or checking for disease or pests. The frames can be removed and examined without disturbing the bees, making it easier for the beekeepe...

The Amazing Queen

A queen honeybee is really quite an extraordinary creature. She can live up to 6 years old (although most beekeepers replace their queens after 2-3 seasons). When she lays an egg, she has the ability to either fertilize or not fertilize it, determining the sex of the developing bee (fertilized eggs become female worker bees, unfertilized become male drones). At the height of the season the queen lays 1,500 eggs per day. She instinctively monitors the state of the hive and will initiate swarming when her hive starts to become crowded. Swarming is when an original queen ...

Beekeeping Course – Three Different Types of Bees

If you take any type of beekeeping course, you will quickly learn that there are three different types of bees in a hive. Each type of honeybee has different, specialized parts to best serve their roles in a colony. Each bee plats a really important role in the hive and it takes each to make a healthy and productive hive. Although many think the queen is, well, the queen, the truth is the collective of the hive is more important than any of the particular roles. The workers are females. They have stingers in their abdomens, as well as special glands that allow them t...

Honeybee Anatomy

Beekeeping Class – Honeybee Anatomy 101 The basic honeybee anatomy for domestic honeybees is consistent across all common breeds. The bee’s main body consists of three major components: the head, the thorax, and the abdomen. The head has all the parts you would expect: the eyes and the antennae. It also has the proboscis, which is the bee’s long tongue that looks like a straw. The thorax is the furry middle section of the bee, and it contains the bee’s two pairs of wings. Bees have large forewings and smaller hindwings that lay underneath them. Bees re...

Langstroth – Pioneer of Beehives

Reverend Lorenzo Langstroth was an American clergyman and amateur entomologist who is credited with inventing the Langstroth hive, the most commonly used hive design in modern beekeeping. Langstroth was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1810 and became interested in bees and beekeeping at an early age. In 1851, Langstroth published a book called “The Hive and the Honey-Bee,” in which he described his observations of bees and their behavior, and outlined his ideas for a new type of hive that would allow the bees to build their honeycombs in a more natura...

New Beekeeper Course – The Development of the 3 Castes of Honeybees in a Hive

A new beekeeper will want to understand the basic hierarchy in their beehive. The female worker, male drone, and the queen bee all start out as identical eggs laid by a queen bee. Differences in fertilization and food determine whether the eggs will develop into a male or female bee and of which caste the bee will become (worker, drone, or queen). It is nothing short of miraculous how these two factors determine the developmental path for each bee and ultimately their role in the beehive/colony. Although the eggs laid by a queen are identical, the queen only fertilizes...

The Win-Win Relationship between Pollinators and Plants

For purposes of this article, the term “pollinator” will refer to the honeybee species Apis Mellifera, honeybees of European origin, mostly kept by backyard beekeepers in the United States. Keep in mind, however, there are many other important native insect pollinators: butterflies, moths, bumble bees, and solitary bees. Also, some grain crops, grasses, and pines depend on wind for pollination. Pollination occurs when the pollen granules from the male anther of a flower is transported to the female pistil. This then allows the plant to produce seeds and fruit. Rese...

Fun & Interesting Facts about Honeybees

honeybees are most commonly sold in 3 pound “packages” which contain approximately 10,000 bees at full strength, a healthy colony can consist of 80,000 bees the majority of bees in a hive are female, called “worker bees” a colony of honeybees has just a few hundred male bees called drones a worker bee egg takes 21 days to develop, a drone takes 24 days, and a queen takes 16 days worker bees fulfill many roles in a hive like nurse, undertaker, guard, wax producer, honeycomb builder, queen attendant, airflow conductor, forager, etc. researchers know of at leas...

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