So, you want to be a beekeeper?

Congratulations.

Good decision 😄.

Beekeeping is a wonderful hobby.

There's a lot to recommend it; it's relatively inexpensive to start, training is usually widely available, it involves an invigorating combination of hard work, practical skill, observation, insight and understanding, and - if you manage all that - your bees should produce some delicious honey that is better than anything available in the supermarket.

In fact, if you get that lot right, and you're blessed with suitable weather (for bees) and have lots of local forage (pollen and nectar), then you'll get more honey than you'll know what to do with.

A strong, healthy hive, in a good area, properly managed by a careful beekeeper, might produce 30-40 kg of honey.

Every year.

Honey and hive products

I love honey.

I have it on toast, on parsnips and on gammon, and I have it with my porridge every morning. However, even I would struggle to get through 30 kg a year (perhaps ~90 jars). And, for a variety of reasons, I recommend that a beekeeper has a minimum of 3 hives.

In a good year these hives will produce a lot of honey.

So, the excess can be used for presents (Christmas and dinner party gifts are never a problem; good, local honey is unfailingly popular) or sold to offset some of those 'relatively inexpensive' costs I mentioned in the opening paragraphs.

And, if you're making honey, then you're probably also making (or producing as a by-product) wax and propolis. The wax can be used to make candles, or wraps, or cosmetics. The propolis - and we're getting a bit more specialised here - is used to produce tinctures.

Don't forget mead ... honey is used as sugar in the production of mead, a drink that has been enjoyed (an adjective that, unfortunately, is never applied to my mead) for millennia.

And, inevitably, those strong, healthy hives will also produce excess bees which you can use to expand the numbers of hives you manage, or can be sold (or given) to other beekeepers.

Count your pennies ... because that's all there might be

All of which means that beekeeping, unlike many other hobbies and pastimes, can sometimes be cost neutral, and might even be profitable in a good year.

However, these financial considerations are not a good reason to take up beekeeping.

Profits are not dependable.

Bee farmers drive mud-encrusted trucks with dodgy differentials, not shiny beemers.

A poor season might yield no honey at all.

In fact, in a really poor season, you'll be buying lots of sugar to prevent starvation of the colonies. Even worse, the occurrence of a notifiable disease might necessitate the destruction of all the bees, and possibly all the hives as well.

If financial profits - or respectable honey yields - were dependable, then more people might keep bees, but I don't think that's the main reason that some who are interested aren't beekeepers.

Bees are not 'fit and forget'

Achieving a good honey crop (or wax, or propolis, or bees, but I'll use honey to indicate all four to make my sentences a little shorter) depends upon the weather, the location and the management of the colonies.

You cannot influence the first of these ... though it's looking more and more as though humans, collectively, influence the climate, which - in turn - determines our weather.

You can - with experience - choose a good location, but how good it is will be greatly influenced by the weather. A dull, wet, cold season always trumps a good location.

The one thing you have total control over (though it might not feel like that 😄) is the management of the colonies.

And the colonies must be managed.

You can't buy a hive of bees, stick it at the bottom of the garden and then expect to have 30 jars of golden honey - let alone 30 kg - at the end of the year.

Well, that's not quite correct, you can do that, but your expectations are very unlikely to be realised.

You might get some honey, but you're more likely to lose most of your bees through swarming. If they do swarm, the weakened colony might then get robbed (of its honey) by wasps or other bees, and the survivors are then unlikely to survive the rigours of the winter.

And, if that all happens, the 'relatively inexpensive' costs you incurred at the beginning will feel very expensive indeed.

Bees and chickens

There are certain similarities between a hive of honey-producing bees at the bottom of the garden, and a coop of egg-laying chickens.

Both produce delicious products - honey and eggs - with a much better flavour than the similar product in a local supermarket. Both eggs or honey, as suggested above, are sometimes given away (though half a dozen eggs would be an odd Christmas present, and would look strange accompanying a good bottle of Merlot if you're invited to a smart dinner party {{1}}), or can be sold.

I'll leave other similarities - such as eating the chickens, or the bees (Ghosh et al., 2021) - out of this comparison. Generally, beekeeping has a similar 'self-sufficiency' vibe to keeping chickens, and often appeals to broadly the same type of people.

However, there are ~25 times the number of households keeping chickens in the UK, as there are households keeping bees {{2}}.

Why is that?

Both involve some initial outlay and both involve ongoing care and maintenance. However, neither need daily attention {{3}}, and the quality of the eggs and honey is so demonstrably better than the purchased equivalents that this attention is surely worthwhile.

There are a few regulations and restrictions that apply to both, probably more to chickens than bees (at least currently), though these are sometimes ignored.

Given the choice - between honey or eggs - many would choose honey ... so why are there so few beekeepers compared to chicken keepers?

I think it comes down to two factors; keeping bees is appreciably more difficult than keeping chickens, and many are put off by the thought of 30,000+ flying, stinging insects.

Honey bees do not need saving

Expected profits are the second-worst reason to start beekeeping.

The worst reason to start beekeeping is to 'save the bees'.

Honey bees do not need saving. In fact, in some places, there are too many of them.

There are about 1,000 capercaillie left in Scotland. This stunning, turkey-sized grouse is (very) distantly related to the domestic chicken. Keeping chickens does nothing to help save the capercaillie. However, chicken-keeping - other perhaps than the spread of avian 'flu - also does no harm to the capercaillie.

But the same cannot be said of the relationship between honey bees and free-living native bumble bees and solitary bees. These free-living bees are threatened by habit fragmentation and destruction, climate change, pesticides, diseases and by competition from honey bees.

Supermarkets and unscrupulous sponsor-a-hive schemes {{4}} either ignore this or don't know any better.

Don't fall for the 'beewash' ... honey bees do not need saving.

And, while I'm on my soapbox (😉) don't fall for the 'honey bees are needed for pollination' nonsense either ... many of those threatened native bees are much more efficient at pollinating plants and trees. Honey bees, because they live in colonies of tens of thousands, might be able to provide more pollination activity but, during lean times, those thousands of honey bees will outcompete the native bees, resulting in these becoming even more threatened.

If you want to 'save the bees' then plant wildflowers {{5}}, leave your lawn unmown and covered in dandelions, stop using pesticides and support initiatives {{6}} that restore natural habitats to benefit all bees.

And, all those things - wildflowers, dandelions, no pesticides etc. - will also benefit honey bees 😄.

Rant over ...

So, you still want to be a beekeeper?

I indicated above that the management of your bees is the only thing you can control, and that colony management is important.

Why is it important and what does it entail?

How much work is involved?

Honey bees {{7}} are not domesticated, but that doesn't mean that they can be abandoned to look after themselves.

Space, swarming, disease and stores

The colony needs space to expand in spring and early summer so that it gets big enough to collect an excess of nectar. It needs more space in which to process the nectar and convert it into honey.

A strong colony in late spring will probably attempt to swarm. If they do swarm, you will lose ~75% of your bees, the workforce that would have collected the excess of nectar. But, in addition to that, the swarm might frighten or irritate members of the public (if it's not collected by a beekeeper - and most aren't). It's better to save all that potential hassle by doing your best to prevent swarming in the first place. Finally, if the colony does swarm, the likelihood is that the swarm will perish; studies have shown that over 75% of swarms do not survive the following winter.

Swarm control increases hive productivity, it avoids frightening 'civilians' and - ironically, considering my comments above - it 'saves the bees' 😉.

Big, strong colonies are a great environment for parasites and disease to spread (though, small, weak colonies are even better, and far less able to defend themselves). Vigilance is required throughout the spring, summer and autumn, and - like swarm control - you might need to intervene to reduce pests and parasites. The timing of this intervention is often critical.

The final management needed is to ensure that the colony - in addition to good health - has sufficient stores to get through the winter. Large numbers of colonies die overwinter (perhaps ~20% on average, though higher in some winters, and much higher for poorly managed colonies ... usually due to poor disease management) but they should not. With good management, winter losses should be well under 10%, and those largely due to unavoidable 'disasters' like flooding/falling trees, or queen failure.

Beekeeping largely involves the management of space, swarming, disease and stores.

That can't be so hard, can it?

Well ...

During the winter the queen lays few (and sometime no) eggs, but her laying rate increases as the day length gets longer. During mid/late spring she might be laying a couple of thousand eggs a day. This means that the colony can expand very fast.

Which means that the colony can rapidly run out of space and/or make preparations to swarm. Space - or its absence - and swarming are linked, but even colonies with ample space may swarm.

At other times of the year, a prolonged period of poor weather might stop a colony from foraging. In a strong colony, there are still thousands of mouths to feed - the adult workers and the developing brood - and so the stores can become depleted very quickly. A week of unseasonal rain or cold may result in starvation.

Typically, management involves an inspection of the hive. You remove the roof, look at the frames of bees and developing brood, ensure they have enough stores and space, look for signs of swarm preparation and disease, and then put everything carefully back together again.

With sufficient experience, you can do this in just a few minutes ... but that experience might take a decade or more to acquire. It's best not to rush things, and when you're starting out it will take a great deal longer.

These inspections must take place throughout the active beekeeping season.

What's that?

It's the period when the weather and forage available means that the bees should be flying ... so, typically from late March to late September, though this depends upon where you live.

Regular as clockwork

That doesn't sound too onerous, does it?

A warm Saturday afternoon spent in the apiary, checking a couple of colonies, tidying the grass and then home for a cuppa on the terrace ... sounds idyllic to me.

Unfortunately, there's a bit more to it than that.

Colony expansion (or colony starvation) continues during brief periods of poor weather. Swarm preparations in particular, once started, are likely to continue.

If the weekend is a washout, with rain and cold winds preventing you inspecting the colonies, the colony may swarm as soon as the weather improves.

Yes, you might be able to delay the inspection until Monday evening after work, and intervene before they scarper, but you're taking a risk. I've known or seen dozens of colonies swarm on the first good day after a period of wet weather in late spring (some of them were mine 😢).

What you definitely cannot do is postpone the inspection until the following weekend ... if you do, and the weather has been good (or bad) they will probably have swarmed (or starved, respectively).

Inspections need to be two things:

1. Sufficiently thorough to check for the things that are important at that time of the season - space, stores, queens cells (swarm preparations), disease etc. With experience, as indicated above, this might take 5 minutes. For a beginner, it might take an hour. Per hive.
2. Regular as clockwork. Typically, once a week. But that means every Saturday, not Saturday one week, Monday the next, Thursday the week after etc. Again, with experience, you have a little more flexibility ... inspections can be at 10-day intervals, particularly after the peak swarming period has passed.

Bad weather? Holidays?

Now for the bad news.

Inspecting a colony on a warm, calm, late Spring morning is a fantastic experience. The sights and sounds of the hive are entrancing. With care, it appears as though the bees hardly know you're there; they continue foraging, the frames you inspect have bees frantically 'dancing' to communicate good sources of nectar, you find the queen calmly walking about looking for vacant cells in which to lay an egg.

It is a truly captivating experience.

But doing an inspection on a chilly, squally, wet afternoon ... er, not so much. The bees definitely know you're there, and they may well not be too pleased to see you. Poorly behaved bees will display their displeasure. Often rather emphatically. Almost the entire colony is 'at home', this makes seeing the brood and eggs tricky, meaning you risk missing things or - conversely - making an already intrusive inspection take even longer.

As before, with experience, you can minimise the time involved in the inspection, or maximise the time between inspections, so carefully avoiding conducting the inspection in truly adverse conditions ... but sometimes it is simply unavoidable.

And you can forget taking a fortnight off in May to visit Andalusia before the school holidays start, the prices increase, and the airport is stuffed with sombrero-wearing kids. Don't think I'm joking ... May and June are usually the peak swarming periods, though it can happen at almost any time during the season.

Two missed inspections mean you can likely bid 'Adios!' to your bees and the chance of getting a good honey crop.

Dedicated beekeepers go on holiday in November, to New Zealand ... where the swarming season is in full-swing, and they can visit their friend's apiaries to help with their hive inspections 😉.

And, before I forget, let me reiterate that the timing of disease management is critical, and one of the things most beginners struggle to get right. Varroa is the biggest problem, and I've discussed irrational and rational strategies to control this parasite previously.

And if that's not enough to put you off ...

Do not underestimate how intimidating a strong colony can feel at the height of the season. I know several people who have taken a winter training course and then abandoned any thought of beekeeping when faced with their first open hive in mid-April ... a time of the season when the colony will be under half the strength it will achieve by midsummer.

Protective clothing helps. A lot. But even with experience and two jackets, it can still be a daunting experience.

I think it's unwise to get your own bees before you've inspected a full colony in mid-season.

Ideally, on a poor day.

Most good beekeeping associations will follow their winter training course with weekends or evenings in a shared apiary, providing hands-on, supervised, practical experience of beekeeping. This, coupled with good mentoring, is probably the best way to learn, but don't be in too much of a rush to get your own bees.

A 'learn-beekeeping-in-a-day' course cannot provide anything like enough 'hive-time' to successfully keep bees. It might be a good introduction {{8}}, but you'll barely scratch the surface of the topic.

Even with a winter training course, lots of weekends and evenings in the association apiary, and a supportive mentor, there will still be many things that you don't understand.

Now, more than 15 years after I started keeping bees {{9}}, I still often sometimes stand cluelessly staring at an open hive thinking "What? Why? When? How? ... Damn!"

And, in many ways, that's part of the attraction of beekeeping.

If it was predictable, if it was invariant, if it didn't require good observation, an understanding of the weather, the environment, the life cycle of bees, their behaviour, the local geography, if it wasn't - at times - an emotional roller-coaster, very hard work, an all-engrossing feast for the senses (sight, sound, taste, smell and touch), and a profound intellectual challenge ... I'd do something else.

My bees are busy rearing brood ... happy times 😄.

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Thank you

Notes

I've run out of space, but also wanted to briefly mention the following:

• You cannot learn beekeeping from books. It's a practical subject. The only way to become competent is to do lots of beekeeping. By all means read everything you can - other than AI-produced generalities - but it's practical experience that is most important.

• The books and that practical experience will mean that you understand why emails from beekeeping supply companies in mid-January, urging you that "Now is the ideal time to treat with Api-Bioxal", are only ideal with regard to their profits. It is not a good time to treat a colony with trickled Api-Bioxal! It will do little good, and it could harm the colony.
• So, don't trust adverts and don't trust the press 😉. The Irish Advertising Standards Authority have recently upheld a complaint about an advert for bees containing pictures of children and adults next to a hive that are not wearing protecting clothing. The Guardian repeated the same error yesterday. Don't think that this is what beekeeping is always like. Wear the proper protective clothing until you are confident, and you know your bees are placid. I have very calm bees and always wear a veil, and almost always wear gloves. The consequences of not doing so can be serious. (Also see 'save the bees' above ... the press rarely distinguish between honey bees and any other bees).
• I will be publishing posts in the next couple of months on colony inspections and some swarm control methods. Subscribe to ensure you don't miss these if you're interested.

References

Ghosh, S., Meyer-Rochow, V.B., and Jung, C. (2021) Honey bees and their brood: a potentially valuable resource of food, worthy of greater appreciation and scientific attention. Journal of Ecology and Environment 45: 31 https://doi.org/10.1186/s41610-021-00212-y.

{{1}}: But would be perfectly acceptable as far as I'm concerned.

{{2}}: The approximate numbers are ~45,000 beekeepers and about 1.3 million households with chickens.

{{3}}: I've not kept chickens ... so excuse my ignorance if I'm wrong. I know you can get light-operated doors for the coop, but perhaps you need to stand guard all night to prevent the local fox making off with the hens.

{{4}}: And I've not seen any sponsor-a-hive programmes that are anything but unscrupulous. They promote 'saving the bees' or biodiversity and - without fail - threaten both. In my view they are simply money-making schemes designed to exploit the gullible or ignorant.

{{5}}: Not a product placement, just a satisfied customer - I've just bought a lot of wildflower seeds from them.

{{6}}: A local example, there are many others.

{{7}}: I'm going to use 'bees' to indicate honey bees from here on ...

{{8}}: And it might be sufficient to convince you that beekeeping is not for you.

{{9}}: And well over 300+ "hive years" ... the multiple of years times hives, which is total experience.