Homestead Handbook Beginning with Honeybees

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You can, if you wish, find the queen by going through every frame in the brood chamber, one by one. Although it may seem impossible to spot that regal bee amongst a horde of thousands, you'd be surprised how she seems to jump out at you when you get the right frame. (She's the one with the enlarged, bright abdomen who's probably trying to scurry away.) As the old-timers in these parts say, "You'll know her when you see her." But if you're just doing a general health check on a colony, you don't really need to find her. Her laying pattern will tell you how things are.

Note: A lot of colony owners are reluctant to go down into brood chambers. (.They're the kind that leave the bees alone all year and timidly "rob" a super or two off the top at the end of the summer, hoping the boxes contain something.) They're called bee-havers. If you want to be able to help your colony, to control the quality of its queen, to increase honey harvests — in other words, to become a bee keeper — you're going to need to be willing to work that brood. So get down in there.

Oh — or rather, Ow! — suppose you do get stung. Don't jerk your hand back and drop the frame you had . . . that's asking for more trouble. Instead, slowly and carefully follow these "ancient beekeeping secrets": [1] Promptly scrape the stinger out with your fingernail or hive tool, and you'll get so little poison you may not swell a bit. If you try to grab it, you'll actually squeeze extra venom into your system. [2] Smoke the spot. A stinging bee releases a banana-scented pheromone to alert its comrades to attack the same area. (Folks who don't smoke their stings often wonder why more and more bees keep popping the same spot!)

See, that wasn't bad, was it? Admit it, actually you found the whole thing a bit thrilling! That's the first tingle of bee fever.

Questions and Answers

Let's take a moment to answer a few common beekeeping questions.

Where can you keep bees?
Anywhere enough nectar-bearing flowers grow. If other people are keeping bees in your area, you probably can, too. If no one is (unless you live in an untapped suburb or city), there's probably not enough forage available.

Where do you put colonies?
Many urban beekeepers put their hives on their rooftops, out of the way of pedestrians. People with hives in crowded neighborhoods keep them out of sight, preferably behind a bush or barrier so the insects will have to fly up a few feet to head out foraging. (Other hints for backyarders: Keep a gentle breed of bees . . . make sure they have a water source on your property... work hard to reduce swarming... and after your first harvest, take your neighbors some gifts of honey and explain to them how innocuous your bees have been.)

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