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Welcome to the wonderful world of beekeeping!

Collecting honey from wild bee colonies is one of the most ancient human activities and is still practiced today by aboriginal societies in parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. Some of the earliest evidence of gathering honey from wild colonies is from rock painting, dating to around 13,000 BC. Gathering honey from wild bee colonies is usually done by subduing the bees with smoke and breaking open the tree or rocks where the colony is located, often resulting in the physical destruction of the colony.

At some point humans began to domesticate wild bees in artificial hives made from hollow logs, wooden boxes, pottery vessels, and woven straw baskets or "skeps." The domestication of bees was well developed in Egypt and sealed pots of honey were found in the grave goods of Pharaohs such as Tutankhamun. Beekeeping was also documented by the Roman writers Virgil, Gaius Julius Hyginus, Varro, and Columella. Aspects of the lives of bees and beekeeping are discussed at length by Aristotle.

Ruins of the Jewish city of Rehov with 2,000 residents around 900 BC yielded 30 intact hives and evidence that an advanced honey industry existed in the Holy Land at the time of the Bible, about 3,000 years ago. The beehives were made of straw and unbaked clay found in orderly rows of 100 hives.

The study of honey bees

In the 1700s European naturalists undertook the scientific study of bee colonies and began to understand the complex and hidden world of bee biology. They used microscopes and dissection to understand the internal biology of honey bees. They constructed glass walled observation hives and sectional hives that could be opened like a book to observe bee activities.

Invention of the moveable comb hive

The mid-1800s saw a revolution in beekeeping practice through the invention and perfection of the movable comb hive by Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth. Langstroth observed that there was a specific spatial measurement between the wax combs, later called 'the bee space', which bees would not block with wax but kept as a free passage.

Langstroth designed a series of wooden frames within a rectangular hive box, carefully maintaining the correct bee space between successive frames, and found that the bees would build parallel honeycombs in the box without bonding them to each other or to the hive walls. This enables the beekeeper to slide any frame out of the hive for inspection, without harming the bees or the comb, protecting the eggs, larvae and pupae contained within the cells. It also meant that combs containing honey could be gently removed and the honey extracted without destroying the comb. The emptied honey combs could then be returned to the bees intact for refilling. Langstroth's classic book, The Hive and Honey Bee, published in 1853, described his extensive knowledge of honey bees and the development of his moveable comb hive.

Hive design

Langstroth's design for moveable comb hives was quickly adopted by beekeepers around the world and a wide range of moveable comb hives were designed and perfected in Europe and the United States. Classic designs evolved in each country: Dadant hives and Langstroth hives are still dominant in the USA; in France the De-Layens trough-hive became popular and in the UK a British National Hive became standard as late as the 1930s although in Scotland the smaller Smith hive is still popular. In some Scandinavian countries and in Russia the traditional trough hive persisted until late in the 20th Century and is still kept in some areas. However, the Langstroth and Dadant designs remain ubiquitous in the USA and also in many parts of Europe, although Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France and Italy all have their own national hive designs.

The differences in hive dimensions are insignificant in comparison to the common factors in all these hives: they are all square or rectangular; they all use moveable wooden frames; they all consist of a floor, brood-box, honey-super, crown-board and roof. Hives have traditionally been constructed of cedar, pine, or cypress wood, but in recent years hives made from injection molded dense polystyrene have become increasingly important.

Most types of hives also use queen excluders between the brood-box and honey supers to keep the queen from laying eggs in cells next to those containing honey intended for consumption. With the recent appearance of mite pests, wooden hive floors are often replaced with a wire screen and a removable tray.

Fixed frame hives

A hive is a set of rectangular wooden boxes filled with moveable wood or plastic frames, each of which holds a sheet of wax or plastic foundation. The bees build cells upon the sheets of foundation to create complete honeycombs. Foundation comes in two cell-sizes:

1. worker foundation, which enables the bees to create small, hexagonal worker cells
2. drone foundation, which allows the bees to build much larger drone cells, for the production of male bee.

The bottom boxes, or brood chambers, contain the queen and most of the bees. The upper boxes, or supers, contain just honey. Only the young nurse bees can produce the wax flakes which they secrete from between their abdominal plate. Bees build honeycomb in the frames using the artificial wax foundation as a starting point, after which they may raise brood or deposit honey and pollen in the cells of the comb. These frames can be freely manipulated and honey supers with frames full of honey can easily be taken of the hive and the frames extracted for their honey crop.

Top bar hives

A few hobby beekeepers are adopting various top bar hives of the type commonly found in Africa. These have no frames and the honey filled comb is not returned to the hive after extraction, as it is in the Langstroth hive. Because of this, the production of honey in a top bar hive is only about 20% that of a Langstroth hive, but the initial costs and equipment requirements are far lower. Top-bar hives do offer some advantages in interacting with the bees and the amount of weight that must be lifted is greatly reduced. Top Bar Hives are more widely used in developing countries.

Protective clothing

Defensive bees are first attracted to a person's breath, and a sting on the face can lead to much more pain and swelling than a sting anywhere else. A sting on a bare arm or hand can usually be quickly removed by fingernail scrape to reduce the amount of venom injected.

While knowledge of bee behavior is the first line of defense, most beekeepers also wear some protective clothing as a second line of defense. The face and neck are the most important areas to protect, so most beekeepers will at least wear a hat with a veil.

Many beekeepers wear a hooded suit and gloves. Some experienced beekeepers elect not to use gloves because they inhibit delicate movements. Protective bee clothing is generally light colored but not colourful and of a smooth material. This provides the maximum differentiation from natural predators (bears, skunks, etc.) which tend to be dark-colored and furry.

The Bee Smoker

Smoke is the beekeeper's third line of defense. Most beekeepers use a "smoker" — a device designed to generate smoke from the incomplete combustion of various fuels. Smoke calms bees by stimulating a feeding response in anticipation of possible hive abandonment due to fire, instead of a stinging response. Smoke also masks alarm pheromones released by guard bees or when bees are accidently squashed in an inspection. The ensuing confusion creates an opportunity for the beekeeper to open the hive and work without triggering a defensive reaction.

Many types of fuel can be used in a smoker as long as it is natural and not contaminated with harmful substances. These fuels include burlap (washed to remove insecticide), pine needles, corrugated cardboard, sumac, and rotten or punky wood. Beekeeping supply companies sell smoker fuel made from pulped paper and compressed cotton, or even aerosol cans of smoke. Some bee keepers like to use liquid smoke, a water-based solution that is sprayed onto the bees from a plastic spray bottle.

History of beekeeping in the United States

Honey bees are not native to the Western Hemisphere. American, Australian, and New Zealand colonists imported honey bees from Europe, partly for honey and partly for their usefulness as pollinators. Most of the honey bees imported into the United States have been Italian bees.

John Harbison successfully brought honey bees from Pennsylvania to California in the 1860s, greatly expanding the market for honey throughout the country. Beekeeping was traditionally practiced for the bees' honey harvest, but these days crop pollination service often provide most of a commercial beekeeper's income. Other hive products are pollen, royal jelly, and propolis, which are also used for nutritional and medicinal purposes, and beeswax, which is used in candle making, cosmetics, wood polish, and for modelling. The modern use of hive products has changed little since ancient times.

Types of beekeepers

Beekeepers generally categorize themselves as:

•     Hobbyist — Beekeeping for personal enjoyment and selling a little honey to supplement income (1 - 25 hives)
•     Sideliner — Beekeeping serves as a secondary source of income (25 - 250 hives)
•     Commercial beekeeper — Beekeeping is the primary source of income (250 hives - 2500 hives or more)

Commercial beekeepers migrate with the seasons, hauling their hives on trucks to southern climates for better wintering and early spring build-up. Many make "nucs" (small starter colonies) for sale or replenishment of their own losses during the early spring. The largest demand for pollination comes from the almond groves in California. Other commercial beekeepers take their hives south to pollinate squash or cucumbers in Florida or make early honey from citrus groves in Florida, Texas or California. As spring moves northward so do the beekeepers, to supply bees for tree fruits, blueberries, strawberries, cranberries and later vegetables. Some commercial beekeepers alternate between pollination service and honey production but most usually cannot do both at the same time.

Some commercial beekeepers keep bees primarily to raise queens and package bees for sale. Beekeepers often buy early spring queens and 3- or 4-pound packages of live worker bees to replenish hives that die out during the winter.

Harvesting Honey

Beekeepers typically harvest honey from July until October, according to the honey flows in their area. Good management requires keeping the hive free of pests and disease, and ensuring that the bee colony has room in the hive to expand. Chemical treatments, if used for parasite control, are done in the off-season to avoid any honey contamination. Success for the hobbyist depends on choosing a location for the apiary so bees have a good nectar source and pollen source throughout the year.


Varroa mites

Varroa are tiny reddish-brown, oval mites that parasitically feed on bees. A female mite crawls into a cell of the honeycomb that has a bee egg in it. When the cell is sealed, the female lays one male egg and as many female eggs as possible. When the mite eggs hatch, they feed on the bee larva. The the male varroa mite fertilizes all the females and dies. The females escape the cell when the bee hatches. Each female mite finds another cell to infest by riding on a nurse bee's body. Drone cells are preferred because they are closed for the longest amount of time.

The bees have no natural way of removing a varroa infestation, so human intervention is required. Insecticides can be used, for example Apiguard, but due to overuse they are now of limited utility. Drone culling (removing capped drone cells) can help to remove varroa, but it also reduces the number of drones that can breed with a virgin queen. Some beekeepers sprinkle powdered sugar on the bees, causing them to groom and remove the mites. This method of removal is organic and also has the advantage that the sugar is then eaten by the bees. Having a screen floor on the hive stops the mites from climbing back up and allows the beekeeper to monitor infestation.

Bee society

A colony of bees consists of three castes:

• a queen, which is normally the only breeding female in the colony
• a large number of female worker bees, typically 30,000–50,000 in one hive
• a number of male drones, ranging from thousands in a strong hive in spring to very few during the winter.

The queen is the only sexually mature female in the hive and all of the female worker bees and male drones are her offspring. The queen may live for up to three years or more and may be capable of laying half a million eggs or more in her lifetime. At the peak of the breeding season, late spring to summer, a good queen may be capable of laying as many as 3,000 eggs in one day, more than her own body weight. This would be exceptional however. A prolific queen could be expected to lay 2,000 eggs a day, while a more average queen might lay 1500 eggs per day.

 The queen is raised from a normal worker egg, but is fed a larger amount of royal jelly than a normal worker bee, resulting in a radically different growth and metamorphosis. The queen influences the colony by the production and dissemination of a variety of pheromones or 'queen substances'. One of these chemicals suppresses the development of ovaries in all the female worker bees in the hive and prevents them from laying eggs.

Mating of queens

The queen emerges from her cell in the comb after 15 days of development. She remains in the hive for 3-7 days before venturing out on a mating flight. Her first orientation flight will only last a few seconds, just enough to mark the position of the hive. Subsequent mating flights may last from 5 minutes to 30 minutes, and she may mate with a number of male drones on each flight. Over several matings, possibly a dozen or more, the queen will receive and store enough sperm from a succession of drones to fertilize hundreds of thousands of eggs. If she does not manage to leave the hive to mate — possibly due to bad weather or being trapped within part of the hive — she will remain infertile and become a 'drone layer', incapable of producing female worker bees, and the hive is doomed.

Mating takes place at some distance from the hive and often several hundred feet up in the air. It is thought that this separates the strongest drones from the weaker ones, ensuring that only the fastest and strongest drones get to pass on their genes.

Fertilized and non-fertilized eggs

Having achieved a successful mating, the queen will begin to lay eggs for the first time a few days later. The vast majority of eggs she lays will be fertilized eggs and will produce female worker bees. If she lays an unfertilized egg it will develop into a male drone. How the colony decides how many workers will be raised versus how many drones will be raised is not fully understood.

Female worker bees

Almost all the bees in a hive are female worker bees. At the height of summer when activity in the hive is frantic and work goes on non-stop, the life of a worker bee may be as short as 6 weeks. in late autumn, when no brood is being raised and no nectar is being harvested, a young bee may live for 16 weeks, right through the winter. During its life a worker bee performs different work functions in the hive which are largely dictated by the age of the bee.

Male bees (drones)

Drones are the largest bees in the hive at almost three times the size of a worker bee. They do no work, do not forage for pollen or nectar and are only produced in order to mate with new queens and fertilize them on their mating flights. They do not possess stings. A bee colony will generally start to raise drones a few weeks before building queen cells in order to supersede a failing queen or in preparation for swarming. When queen raising for the season is over, bees in colder climates typically drive the drones out of the hive to die, biting and tearing at their legs and wings. In cold weather drones become a useless burden on the colony which can no longer be tolerated. Varroa mites affect drones more than female bee larvae because of the longer amount of time drones stay in the cells to mature. The culling of drone larvae to reduce varroa mite infestation is sometimes blamed for leaving poorly mated queens, although there is no proven connection.


Differing stages of development

Structure of a bee hive

A bee colony is housed in a rectangular hive body within which parallel frames carry the vertical plates of honeycomb which contain the eggs, larvae, pupae and food for the colony. If one were to cut a vertical cross-section through the hive from side to side, the brood nest would appear as a roughly ovoid ball spanning 5-8 frames of comb. The two outside combs at each side of the hive tend to be used for long-term storage of honey and pollen.

Within the central brood nest, a single frame of comb will typically have a central disk of eggs, larvae and sealed brood cells which may extend almost to the edges of the frame. Immediately above the brood patch an arch of pollen-filled cells extends from side to side, and above that again a broader arch of honey-filled cells extends to the frame tops. The pollen is protein-rich food for developing larvae, while honey is also food but largely energy rich rather than protein rich. The nurse bees that care for the developing brood secrete a special food called 'royal jelly' after feeding themselves on honey and pollen. The amount of royal jelly which is fed to a larva determines whether it will develop into a worker bee or a queen.

Apart from the small amounts honey stored within the central brood frames, the bees store surplus honey in combs above the brood nest. In modern hives the beekeeper places separate boxes, called 'supers', above the brood box, providing a series of shallower combs for storage of honey. This enables the beekeeper to remove some of the supers in the late summer, and to extract the surplus honey harvest, without damaging the colony of bees and its brood nest below. Bees need a quantity of honey to survive winter, so if too much honey is taken from the hive, the beekeeper must replace these stores by feeding sugar water or corn syrup in autumn.

Annual cycle of a bee colony

The development of a bee colony follows an annual cycle of growth which begins in spring with a rapid expansion of the brood nest, as soon as pollen is available for feeding larvae. Some brood may begin to develop even during cold weather, but breeding accelerates towards a peak in May, producing an abundance of harvesting bees synchronised to the main 'nectar flow' in the spring. The skill of the beekeeper lies in predicting when the nectar flow will occur and in trying to ensure that his colonies achieve a maximum population of harvesters at exactly the right time.

The key factor in this is the prevention, or skillful management of the swarming impulse. If a colony of bees swarms unexpectedly leaves the hive, the beekeeper is likely to harvest significantly less honey from that hive, having lost half his worker bees at a single stroke. If, however, the beekeeper can use the swarming impulse to breed a new queen but keep all the bees in the colony together, this will maximize the chances of a good harvest. It takes many years of learning and experience to be able to manage all these aspects successfully, though many beginners often achieve a good honey harvest.

Formation of new colonies

All bee colonies are totally dependent on their queen, who is the only egg-layer. However, even the best queens typically live only one or two years. As the queen ages she begins to run out of stored sperm and her pheromones begin to fail. At some point, inevitably, the queen begins to falter and the bees will decide to replace her by creating a new queen from one of her worker eggs. They may do this because she has been damaged (lost a leg or an antenna), because she has run out of sperm and cannot lay fertilized eggs (has become a 'drone laying queen') or because her pheromones have dwindled to a point where they cannot control all the bees in the hive anymore.

At this juncture the bees will produce one or more queen cells by modifying existing worker cells which contain a normal female egg. However, there are two distinct behaviors which the bees pursue:

1.    Supersedure: queen replacement within one hive without swarming
2.    Swarm cell production: the division of the hive into two colonies by swarming

Supersedure is highly valued as a behavioral trait by beekeepers because a hive that supersedes its old queen does not swarm and so no bees are lost; the colony merely creates a new queen and allows the old one to fade away, or alternatively she is killed when the new queen emerges. When superseding a queen the bees will produce just one or two queen cells, characteristically in the center of the face of a broodcomb.

In swarming, by contrast, a great many queen cells are created — typically a dozen or more — and these are located around the edges of a broodcomb, most often at the sides and the bottom.Once either process has begun, the old queen will normally leave the hive with the hatching of the first queen cells. When she leaves the hive the old queen is accompanied by a large number of bees, predominantly young bees (wax-secreters), who will form the basis of the new hive. Scouts are sent out from the swarm to find suitable hollow trees or rock crevices and as soon as one is found the entire swarm moves in, building new wax brood combs within a matter of hours using the honey stores which the young bees have filled themselves with before leaving the old hive. Only young bees can secrete wax from special abdominal segments and this is why there tends to be more young bees than old in swarms. Often a number of virgin queens accompany the first swarm (the 'prime swarm'), and the old queen is replaced as soon as a daughter queen is mated and laying. Otherwise, she will be quickly superseded in their new home.

Factors that trigger swarming

It is generally accepted that a colony of bees will not swarm until it has completed all its brood combs, i.e. filled all available space with eggs, larvae and brood. This generally occurs in late Spring at a time when the other areas of the hive are rapidly filling with honey stores. So one key trigger of the swarming instinct is when the queen has no more room to lay eggs and the hive population is becoming very congested. Under these conditions a prime swarm may issue with the queen, resulting in a halving of the population within the hive and leaving the old colony with a large amount of hatching bees. The queen who leaves finds herself in a new hive with no eggs, no larvae but lots of energetic young bees who create a new set of brood combs from scratch in a very short time.

Another important factor in swarming is the age of the queen. Those under a year in age are unlikely to swarm unless they are extremely crowded, while older queens are much more predispositioned to swarm. Beekeepers monitor their colonies carefully in spring and watch for the appearance of queen cells, which are a dramatic signal that the colony is determined to swarm.Before leaving the hive, swarming worker bees fill their stomachs with honey in preparation for the creation of new honeycombs in a new home. This cargo of honey also makes swarming bees less inclined to sting and a newly issued swarm is noticeably gentle for up to 24 hours — often capable of being handled without gloves or veil by a beekeeper. The swarm is looking for shelter. A beekeeper may capture it and introduces it into a new hive helping to meet this need. Otherwise, it will return to a feral state, in which case it will find shelter in a hollow tree, an excavation, an abandoned chimney or even behind shutters.

Back at the original hive, the first virgin queen to emerge from her cell will immediately seek out to kill all her rival queens who are still waiting to emerge from their cells. However, usually the bees deliberately prevent her from doing this, in which case she may lead a second swarm from the hive. Successive swarms are called 'after-swarms' or 'casts' and can be very small, often with just a thousand or so bees, as opposed to a prime swarm which may contain as many as ten to twenty thousand bees.

Small after-swarms have less chance of survival and may deplete the original hive threatening its survival as well. When a hive has swarmed despite the beekeeper's preventative efforts, a good management practice is to give the depleted hive a couple frames of open brood with eggs. This helps replenish the hive more quickly, and gives a second opportunity to raise a queen, if there is a mating failure.

Artificial swarming

When a colony accidentally loses its queen, it is said to be 'queenless'. The workers realize that the queen is absent after as little as an hour, as her pheromones fade in the hive. The colony cannot survive without a fertile queen laying eggs to renew the population. So the workers select cells containing eggs aged less than three days and enlarge these cells dramatically to form 'emergency queen cells'. These appear similar to large peanut-like structure about an inch long, which hangs from the center or side of the brood combs.

Beekeepers use the ability of bees to produce new queens in order to increase their colonies, a procedure called splitting a colony. In order to do this, they remove several brood combs from a healthy hive, taking care that the old queen is left behind. These combs must contain eggs or larvae less than three days old which will be covered by young 'nurse bees' which care for the brood and keep it warm.

These brood combs and attendant nurse bees are then placed into a small 'nucleus hive' along with other combs containing honey and pollen. As soon as the nurse bees find themselves in this new hive and realise that they have no queen they set about constructing emergency queen cells using the eggs or larvae which they have in the combs with them.