Resources

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...

How Beekeepers and HoneyBees Help the Environment

Become a Backyard Beekeeper – Help Save the World! Did you know that honeybees play a significant role in pollinating plants and flowers, which helps the environment? Honeybees not only help produce honey and other bee products, but they are also instrumental in spreading pollen to fertilize plants. By ensuring the survival of honeybees, we can help keep our planet healthy and thriving. Learn more about how these fantastic creatures help our ecosystem below. Six ways honeybees help the environment Honeybees are essential for several reasons. There are six ...

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...

You Too Can Become a Beekeeper

Somewhere, somehow, you’ve had your interest peaked about honeybees and how to become a beekeeper. Maybe you have a local farmers market with a honey vendor. Maybe you see white boxes stacked at the edge of a field while driving to visit your in-laws. You decide to stop just thinking about it and look into it. But, like so many of our well-intended plans, it gets put on the backburner. Months, maybe even a year, pass by and you finally get around to learning more about beekeeping. After only a few minutes of reading online, your head spins with questions. Who does it...

Book Review: The Backyard Beekeeper, 4th Edition

Shannon - HoneyBee School and Supply

October 30, 2021

Overview of “The Backyard Beekeeper” The Quarto Publishing Group released the 4th edition of Kim Flottum’s book, “The Backyard Beekeeper”, in 2018 and it is one of the recent books on the subject I have read. Back in my earliest years of backyard beekeeping, I was fortunate to hear Kim Flottum speak at a GCBA membership meeting, sometime in 2010, I believe. Mr. Flottum is a local beekeeping legend as he lives in the Medina area and has been the editor for Bee Culture magazine for decades. He is considered one of North America’s experts on b...

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...

My Experience with Africanized Honeybees

My son and I attended the Greater Cleveland Beekeepers Association Beginner Beekeeper Class Series in February 2010. During those classes and throughout the next few years of attending monthly meetings, the topic of Africanized Honeybees was mentioned here and there. No in-depth discussion since we in the northern states do not need to worry about Africanized Honeybees. They are typically only a concern for the southern, hotter climate regions. The Africanized Honeybee as we know it in the United States is the result of experimentation done in Brazil in the late 1950s....

Beeswax Products

Keeping honeybees is a rewarding hobby. There is the satisfaction of helping to provide a healthy and monitored home for these fantastic pollinators. It is a calming experience to work a hive and witness the inner workings of a truly amazing social and communal insect. Then of course, there is the tangible reward of collecting surplus honey at the end of a season. Pollen and propolis are also available for harvesting from a honeybee hive; both are thought to have value for their health benefits. Second to honey, beeswax is a reward usually most appreciated by backyard ...

Creating a Pollinator-Friendly Garden

Honeybees, the most efficient and prolific pollinators, have not been doing so well in nature. Feral hives (wild honeybee hives that exist in nature and are not managed and maintained by a beekeeper) have been dwindling in numbers for decades due to pesticides, fertilizers, reduced natural environment, diseases, and other stressors. Becoming a backyard beekeeper is one way to help strengthen the world’s population of honeybees. But if keeping 60,000+ bees in your backyard is not your thing, then possibly providing a bee friendly and bee healthy environment in your ya...