Bees, Please!

If you’re looking to adopt 60,000 low-maintenance pets, then honeybees are the perfect friends for you. Even your mom might approve! Other pets rely on humans for everything — warmth, protection, exercise and play, food and water, and the most-dreaded “duty,” poop cleanup. Since honeybees take care of themselves in virtually every way, beekeeping is mostly a stewardship. This means that the beekeeper will just watch over and protect the bees. After the first spring inspection, a good beekeeper will check on them once every three to four weeks through the summer and fall, until it’s time to extract, or take out, the honey.

When most people think of beehives, they picture a skep beehive, which is like a round basket woven from grass. But most beekeepers no longer use this type of hive, because it is destroyed during honey harvesting. Modern beehives are made of movable frames inside wooden boxes that stack on top of each other. There are two common sizes: medium or deep. Deep boxes can weigh as much as you do — between fifty and ninety pounds when full of bees and honey. So many beekeepers choose medium-sized boxes, which are easier to lift. A stack of three to five boxes makes a nice apiary, or home, for a colony of bees, having only one queen for all the boxes.

Bee season begins as the weather warms up, about the third week in April. Bees hibernate during the winter (called overwintering), so this is the time that they “wake up” and begin flying about. They are hungry and looking for nectar. Beekeepers sometimes feed the bees with sugar water for the first couple of weeks until more plants are blooming and more nectar is available to make honey, which the bees store and eat.

Bees can find drinking water themselves, but most urban beekeeping laws require beekeepers to provide fresh water. Bees remember flight patterns and return to the first water source they find, so it’s important to establish a water source before introducing the hive to your property. Good water sources would be a basin at the bottom of a rain gutter, a slow leak from a rain barrel onto a board, or a bird bath with floating corks. Bees need a place to land — like floating corks, or rocks and sticks — so they can drink.

Do beekeepers clean up after bees? Bees are tidy creatures. If other bees die, they clear the dead bees out of the hive. If wasps or hornets try to rob the hive, they kill them and remove the bodies. Even during overwintering, bees take “cleansing flights” away from the colony to go pee and poop. Beekeepers like to keep tidy apiaries, too, and one problem — which isn’t a problem in the wild — is brace comb. Also called burr or bridge comb, it is simply honeycomb the bees have built in a place that gets in the beekeeper’s way. Beekeepers remove it during inspections.

To inspect a hive, a beekeeper begins by getting dressed in special gear. First, the beekeeper slips on a white long-sleeved shirt that has a hat with a netted veil attached. Next are some canvas gloves that go high up the keeper’s arms, like ballroom gloves. Thick denim pants and solid athletic shoes complete the outfit.

Only two tools are truly needed to work with bees: a smoker and a hive tool. Hive tools are small metal crow bars that serve multiple purposes. Among them are scraping brace comb, lifting frames, and separating hive boxes. The smoker looks like a teapot with a small accordion called a bellows. When it is pumped, smoke builds up in the smoker and pours out the top. Beekeepers smoke their bees to sedate them and keep them from flying too much during inspections.

Knowing that bees take care of themselves, good beekeepers show restraint rather than interfering with the hive too often. When they do peek inside, they are looking for brood (bee babies) and checking on honey production. If there are little white dots visible in the capped-off cells, then the next batch of bees is growing — the hive is “pregnant.” Since worker bees only live about six weeks, there should always be brood. During bee season, beekeepers adjust the number of boxes in an apiary to give the bees the perfect amount of space to control the temperature and to encourage honey production.

Bees seldom need protection, but depending on where you live, you might need to take a couple of precautions. Mice sometimes try to move in for the winter months, so they can live somewhere warm and eat all the honey. If this is the case, you can attach some chicken wire to the bottom hive entrance. As issues arise — and often there are none — a beekeeper responds calmly.

In fact, staying calm is the only trait you need to be a good beekeeper. Of course, from time to time, bees may get inside a beekeeper’s suit. Staying calm, moving away from the colony, and removing your bee suit is usually all it takes to remedy the situation. Honeybees are gentle and don’t like to sting, since they die after doing so.

When it’s time to harvest the honey, beekeepers have a couple of choices. If your only goal is to be a guardian or steward over the bees, you can leave all the honey for the bees. If you choose to harvest, the manual option is to “crush and strain” the comb. It’s a quick process using simple tools: a bucket, a straining cloth, and a potato masher. Another option is a spin extractor, which uses centrifugal force to separate the honey from the waxy comb.

As you can see, beekeeping can be as involved or as easy as you make it. Bees are the ultimate pets because they take care of their own needs, pollinate and beautify the garden, and produce one of the sweetest treats around. Honeybees are very gentle, and beekeeping is a safe hobby to share with your favorite adult.