Homestead Handbook Beginning with Honeybees

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Note: Since extracting puts stress on bee equipment, if you do want to extract you'll have to use special thick, wired foundation in your frames. On the other hand, since you want to be able to eat comb honey, you start that off on thin, nonwired foundation.

How much honey will you get?
If you're in a good beekeeping area, if the weather's great that year, and if your bees do well, you can get 100-200 pounds (30-60 gallons) or even more from one hive! Not me. Where I live — an area where woodland trees are the main nectar sources — my hives probably average 50 pounds each . . . which, by the way, is the national average. (That includes the really lousy year when I may not get any.) In most places, two hives — a good number to start with — should give you all the honey you can use and some extra to give away (or sell).

Can you make money from beekeeping?
Yes, some. Don't expect a full-time income. A commercial beekeeper owns at least 500 hives and drives them all over the place to pollinate crops.

But you can make some sideline money from bees. Say you sell your honey for about a dollar a pound. If you hit the national average, you'll earn $50 per hive (not counting expenses). Most beekeepers don't keep more than 20-25 hives in one yard (they may have several outyards on other people's property). So you may earn $1,000 or more from each beeyard. The more hives you have, though, the more investment and work will be required. And please, don't try to expand past a few hives until you've kept bees several years and have gotten over the first overenthusiastic flush of bee fever.

How do you prevent swarming?
Swarming — the departure of many or most of a colony's bees with the old queen, leaving behind the other bees and some new queen cells — can cripple a hive's honey production, but it's the way colonies per se reproduce. You can't prevent it. There are scores of intricate methods for reducing swarming. In essence, though, colonies that are overcrowded or have older queens are more likely to swarm. So give your colonies plenty of space in the spring. And consider requeening your hives every other year — it cuts swarming in half. (Requeening entails killing the old monarch and, a day later, installing a caged, new — probably mailordered — one. It's a bit tricky, but not too tricky.)

What if you have a really mean hive of bees?
It happens. Some colonies are more aggressive than others. Often, the meanest bees gather the biggest harvests, so you may choose to frown and bear it. If they bother you (or your neighbors) too much, you can solve the problem in one fell swoop . . . by requeening. A more docile queen will lay more docile eggs, and in six weeks you'll have an entire hive of more docile bees. The one hitch to this scheme is you'll have to work your way down through the brood chamber of your nasty colony so you can find the old queen and kill her. (Bundle up!)

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