Basic Introduction To Beekeeping & Beehive Management
Beekeeping is a unique and an immensely rewarding hobby not only spiritually but has the potential to give great financial rewards also. Managing beehives and bees offers excellent educational opportunities and a chance to get back to nature. If you have an interest in nature and you appreciate it you’ll be amazed by the new world that will be opened up to you, if you’re a gardener you’ll greatly treasure the extra bounty that pollinating bees will bring to your plants particularly to the fruits and vegetables on that garden.
Beekeeping is really not that difficult in fact I’d say it’s relatively easy, you can involve the whole family and spend some great quality time, all you need is a little guidance to get you started and this website will provide you will all of the necessities needed to get you on path.
Most people who start beekeeping do this as a hobby; it’s relaxed, casual and often fun. But the truth is that there’s more to beekeeping that what meets the eye. It requires knowledge of bees, growing things and the natural world in general. Success in everything requires a great level of commitment and most successful beekeeper have committed themselves to learning, understanding and enjoying bees. If your involvement in beekeeping will mean something less than this, then I’m sorry to say beekeeping is not for you.
Extended observation and studies conducted on bees have indicated that honey bees are social insects; each colony has the potential of growing to over 50 000 bees. Every colony has a social order whereby each and every member has a designated task. You get the queen bee, whose sole responsibility is to lay and fertilize the eggs, then the drones provide the sperm that the queen uses to fertilize the eggs she lays and then there are the worker bees that devote their entire lives to ensuring the welfare and survival of the colony.
The most important member of the colony is the queen bee, she’s reared in a special cell and being the queen her cell is normally larger than regular cells. She develops from fertilized eggs just like the worker bees, however in the larval phase of her life she’s fed royal jelly which is a glandular food which is secreted from the hypopharyngeal glands in the heads of young worker bee termed the nurse bees. This allows her to grow much quicker than the drone or worker bees.
Queen bees are born with fully developed ovaries and by the time she’s 5 to 10 days after emerging from the cell. She takes flight and mates with drones in the air, she’ll keep on mating with about 10 – 14 of these drones until she has received enough sperm which is stored in a special organ termed the spermatheca. Once this organ has been filled with drone sperm she’ll never mate again and that’s how she gets to fertilize her own eggs.
The queen can lay up to 2000 eggs each day, she can also choose whether to lay drone eggs or worker eggs. The queen bee has an 8 to year 10 years life span; however in production colonies it’s wiser to replace it every 3 to 5 years. When the queen ages her sperm count falls and the eggs she lays become unfertilised and whenever eggs are not fertilised they produce more drones and she becomes the “Drone-Layer”.
Male bees are called drones and their only function is reproduction. When a drone mates with a queen during her nuptial flight he’ll perish in the act as he would have served his purpose. A single colony will keep a few hundred drones during the active foraging season, should the food supply become less, the drones are ejected from the colonies by worker bees and be starved to death as they feed directly from the honey in the storage cells.
The worker bee… as the name suggests spends its life in service to the colony. During the first three weeks they’re called the hive or house bees, they groom themselves, clean the brood cells, clean the hive feed the older and younger larvae, evaporate the nectar, build the comb, feed the queen, feed young drones and maintain an even temperature in the brood nest and they also guard the entrance their hive.
It’s advisable that someone who’s starting beekeeping does so with one or two hives and grow from there as more knowledge is gained, but two hives will increase your chances of success especially in winter periods. To start out the following equipment is required, a complete bee suit, bee gloves, good pairs of boots, bee veil, smoker, bee hive and hive tools. Safety is of utmost importance because when you work with bees all it takes is a gap that’s half an inch wide for bees to gain access to you.
The next essential part of beekeeping is the placement of your hives, if you have a big property then you may have an area where you can easily find a good location to place your hives. It should be near a fresh water source, nectar and pollen source so to give the bees easy access to food, all of these can still be provided by the beekeeper. Beekeeping is highly sustainable although bees are active during certain times of the year and it lasts throughout every season.
|
Absolutely Yes Rudolf! I Want to Know All The Secrets, So That I Can Become A Master Beekeeper!!! Send Me My Free “Beekeeping Mastery” Email Course Today! You Will Receive the First Lesson in Your Inbox Immediately. 100% Spam Free! I Value Your Email Privacy. |
