Advice For Novice Beekeepers. Part 1

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

Keep bees - don't lie in the cold

Having visited any agricultural exhibition, you will be amazed at the abundance of honey and beekeeping products offered by representatives of different regions. Usually these are products of large beekeeping farms from Bashkiria, Altai, Stavropol and other regions. But more and more often you can see a couple of hives in garden plots. The number of amateur beekeepers is growing. However, one should not think that keeping a bee colony is a simple matter. There are many secrets here. We'll talk about some of them today.

Bee venom is serious

If you decide to keep bees in your garden, be sure to remember or ask if you or your loved ones are allergic to a bee sting. You should also ask your neighbors about this. If no one has allergies, you can freely have bees and keep them on your site all summer. But if at least one of the family members is allergic to a bee sting, then think it over carefully before introducing these insect toilers. The fact is that if a person does not even come close to the hive, sooner or later he will be bitten by bees. There are many reasons for this:

• when selecting honey, bees become angrier and can bite everyone around them, not just the beekeeper;
• if you get into the hive and somehow anger the bees, then they can attack strangers;
• if a person stands in front of the entrance or walks past him, then he will certainly be bitten by a bee or several bees at once.

According to scientists, the effect of bee venom depends on the amount that has entered the human body, and on how the human body tolerates bee stings. If, for example, you are stung by from 100 to 300 bees at the same time, then there is a general poisoning of the body. The symptoms of this poisoning are felt by people who are allergic to a bee sting. Doctors consider 100 milligrams of bee venom to be a lethal dose. If this translates into bee stings, then you should be bitten by about 500 bees at once. Bites on the lips, tongue and the side of the neck are especially dangerous. With these bee stings, a person can die.

To make the bees bother your neighbors less and bite them less, I recommend making a continuous fence with a height of 2.5 to 3 meters between neighboring areas. Then your bees, flying over the fence, will fly over the areas of neighbors and, accordingly, will not bite them.

Selection of hives

When choosing the type of hive, I recommend proceeding from the local climatic and honey-gathering conditions and the location of the hives: will your bees stay in the summer during the main bribe in the country, or will you roam with bees, taking them to places of abundant flowering of herbs, linden and other plants, so that they collect more honey. I have used different types of hives in my practice:

• single-body for 12 nest frames, frames were Dodan systems;
• a lounger for 20-22 nest frames of the Dodan system;
• multi-body hives.

In a single-hull 12-frame hive and in a lounger, the size of the nesting frames is 435 x 300 mm. And in multi-body hives there are no nesting frames, in each body the frames have the same size: 435 x 230 mm. Such a hive is convenient for transporting bees, as well as for joining several bee colonies into one colony and for dividing a bee colony into several different colonies. Therefore, if you are going to roam with an apiary, I advise you to pay attention to multihull hives. One drawback of these hives: bees hibernate worse on their frames and come out weaker in spring than in hives with 435 x 300 mm nest frames. If you have a warm and dry wintering room for bees, where the temperature does not drop below -3oC in winter, then you can opt for multi-hive hives. But if you will not go out with bees in the summer,I recommend keeping them in beehives for 20 nesting frames or in hives for 10-12 nesting frames.

Bee lands

If you are going to keep bees only in the country, then before you start them, I recommend to ask if there are enough honey plants within a radius of 2-3 kilometers from your garden plot. If there are no honey plants, or there are very few of them, then your bees will not be able to provide honey not only for you, but also for themselves with food for the coming winter. They simply have nowhere to find and bring nectar for making honey. And if they do not store honey for the winter, they will die of hunger.

If there are enough honey plants in the area, then the bees can be kept in the garden area, without even going to other places in the summer. A strong bee family will always provide itself and you with real honey.

How many hives do you need

Some novice beekeepers start only one hive for testing - one bee colony. I recommend starting several bee colonies at once: at least two. This is for insurance purposes. It so happens that in one of the bee colonies, for some reason, the queen will disappear. And at the same time, in the hive, and this happens, there is no open brood, because of which the bees will not be able to breed a new queen. Such a queenless bee colony is doomed to perish. But if you have two or more colonies, you can rearrange the frame with the open brood from another hive into the hive without a queen, and in this way save the queenless bee colony. On the eggs of an open brood, bees will lay queen cells and hatch a new queen.

Continue reading:

Tips for novice beekeepers. Part 2 →

Dmitry Mamontov, Moscow

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