There’s a big difference between being a bee keeper and being a bee farmer. No, I’m not talking about the big companies that truck their hundreds of bee hives around the country to pollinate farmer’s crops.

In this article “How To Farm Bees” I’m talking about a bee keeper who has mastered the art of how to farm bees or taking bee keeping to the next level. S/he has more then a couple of strong colonies of bees and beehives and makes not just honey to sell, but also sells other bee products including propolis, pollen, beeswax, and even nucleus bee colonies.

A bee farmer will have years of experience under his belt and know his bees well. He will also track expenses and income from selling bee products.

Knowing How To Farm Bees Can Lead To Income

Becoming a bee farmer and knowing how to farm bees is a good home-based business to get into. It is a low cost and low technology field to get into. You will work from your home and set your own hours. And honey bees self propagate. In other words, all you have to do is buy the first one or two hives, and then split the hives in half when they get too big. Year after year, your bee colonies will grow.

The other great thing about knowing how to farm bees and becoming an expert bee keeping is that demand for honey and bee products is rising, especially with the disappearance of honey bees (Colony Collapse Disorder). Just in the U.S., honey consumption is over 300 million pounds per year.

And then there are the other bee products to sell.

Bee pollen has become a very hot commodity, with its ability to help people decrease allergic reactions. And propolis is also widely used in cosmetics, lozenges, gum, and ointments. It is also known to help heal burns, infections, and dental pain.

And of course, beeswax is used in hand creams and candles to name just a few of its uses. Aren’t those honey bees wonderful little creatures.

Bee farming is a wonderful home based business that can provide the bee farmer’s family years of fresh honey and other bee products, and can be a solid source of income, too. Knowing how to farm bees can open up whole new revenue and employment opportunities.

Becoming a bee farmer is the perfect home based business for people who are detail oriented, who like being outdoors, and who love taking care of animals or pets. Many bee farmers love their bees and feel they are part of their family, and they consider bee farming to be a wonderful occupation, and knowing how to farm bees a wise skill.

Honey bees are fascinating little bugs with strong work ethics. They will literally work themselves to death for their hive. But more then that the products they produce, honey and beeswax, have benefited human kind ever since we figured out how to get at their honey. Here’s some fun and fascinating bees facts in no particular order.

• Bees will travel the equivalent of flying 4 times around the earth to produce 2 pounds of honey.
• A colony of bees will visit about 225,000 flowers per day.
• A queen bee will lay almost 2000 eggs a day, or about 5 or 6 eggs per minute.
• The honey bee, who has five eyes, can see in ultra violet light.
• A queen lays between 175,000-200,000 eggs per year.
• The honey bee dances when it wants to tell other bees where to go to find honey and nectar.
• The bee has stiff, curved hairs on it back legs so it can carry a big load of pollen.
• Honey is the only food that contains the antioxidant pinocembrin, which is  associated with improved brain functioning.
• The honey bee’e eyes are made up of thousands of lenses.
• It uses the sun and other landmarks to figure out where its going and how to get back to the hive.
• It has three simple eyes on the top of its head.
• Honey bees have 170 odorant receptors. Their sense of smell is so strong that they can tell different flowers apart and whether the flower has nectar or pollen, from long distances away.
• The honey bee has been in existence  for millions of years
• It survives harsh winters by living off of stores of honey and staying in a big ball of bees to keep warm. All bees rotate to the back and move forward so no bee dies of cold.
• It is the only insect that produces a food that human’s eat.
• Honey is the only food that includes all necessary elements to sustain life: which includes minerals, vitamins, enzymes, and water.
• The honey bee’s wings make about 200 beats per second,  this is what makes the buzzing sound.
• A honey bee can fly about 15 miles per hour.
• A honey bee will fly up to six miles per trip when foraging for nectar.
• A bee travels an average 1600 round trips in order to produce one ounce of honey.
• To produce 1 pound of beeswax, bees will eat about 8 pounds of honey.
• A worker bee will make up to about 1/12th teaspoon of honey in during their short life.
• While out collecting nectar the honey bee will visit up between 50 to 100 flowers.
• The bee’s brain is about the size of a sesame seed.
• Each colony of honey bees has its own unique odor. This is how honey bees identify their own colony.
• About 1100 honey bee stings are required in order to be fatal.
• Bees see all colors except the color red.
• One bee hive can contain between 40,000-45,000 bees.
• All worker honey bees are female. The only males are drones and there aren’t very many of them.
• Honey bees on average live for about 6 weeks. The Queen can live up to two year.
• And one more bees facts, to make one pound of honey, honey bees will visit about 2 million flowers.

If you’re seriously thinking about becoming a beekeeper than the first thing you want to do (beside learning all you can about bee keeping) is to buy all the apiary supplies you will need. Some people will say you can purchase used bee hive equipment by searching Craig’s List or other sites, but it is better to buy brand new bee supplies if you are a beginner bee keeper.

Used bee equipment can bring diseases or pests with it. And if you don’t know what to look for, you can find your first batch of honey bees dead before your first honey harvest.

Doing a search online for beekeeping supplies will bring back hundreds of search results so make sure you check out their return policies and see if they have any customers satisfaction reviews.

The best place to find your new beekeeping supplies is to search the local yellow pages or do a search online by typing in  ” apiary supplies products “, or something similar, to find businesses that sell bee supplies, products and services. Also be sure to check with beekeeping groups, bee keeping online forums, and any local beekeeper clubs to see which companies they recommend.

The essential bee keeping equipment you will need for your new adventure includes:

• A package of honey bees and queen bee.
• A bee hive: the most popular is the Langstroth beehive. The hive should include a queen excluder, a metal covered top, one inner cover, two shallow 10-frame supers with frames, one bottom board, and two standard 10-frame hive bodies.
• A white beehive suit and boots. (Avoid textured and dark material.)
• A hat and veil: Always wear a veil as getting stung on the face is extremely painful and getting stung in the eye can cause you to loss your eye sight.
• A smoker: Used to calm the bees so you can work with them more easily.
• Entrance reducers: blocks that prevent robbing or rodents to enter the hive.
• A hive tool: which looks like a small pry bar. It’s used for separating the supers and hive bodies.
• Bee feeder: sugar syrup is poured into this and feeds the bees

Of course there are lots of apiary supplies and equipment that you may find yourself “needing” as time goes by. Each bee keeper ends up wanting different tools depending on their likes and preferences. But the above listed bee hive tools should be in your arsenal before you pick up your first package of bees at the post office.

And some people say gloves should be one the list but gloves can actually make your touch insensitive to bees and cause more harm then good. It’s up to the indivdual bee keeper as to whether to wear gloves or not.

Keeping bees and beehives have been a favorite backyard past-time for man through out the centuries, with rarely little changing expect the bee hives. So just how much have beehives changed, and what is the best bee hive type to use for backyard bee keeping?

Before man made bee hives were invented, honey bees made their nests in hollow trees, caves, tree branches and other places that offered them structure and safety.

The old time bee hives that man invented were called “fixed-frame” bee hives because there were no removal internal parts in it. These types of bee hives were inefficient in that the hives, and usually the bees, had to be destroyed in order to get the honey out. This type of honey extraction was done by crushing the honey comb wax to get the honey out. The process created a lot of wax but much less honey.

One of the oldest know beehive types is called a Skep, which are baskets placed with their open ends done. The skep has been in use for about 2000 years. In some parts of the world they were made with mud, dung and straw. Other parts of the world made them from coils of grass and straw.  (I had a photo of an old skep to put here but was having technical difficulties, so I wasn’t able to load any photos to this page. Bummer.

The Skep has to major disadvantages and is therefore illegal in some countries, including the U.S. The first disadvantage of the Skep is that is hard for bee keepers to inspect the combs for pests and diseases. The second is that the honey is almost impossible to remove without killing the the whole colony.

Today there are two types of modern or “movable” hives that are commonly used. The Langstroth hive was invented in the 1860s by Rev. Lorenzo Langstroth. It has become the standard style of beehive and is used by 75% of the world’s apiarists.This type of bee hive has many styles and comes in different sizes and frame numbers.

The Langstroth has enclosed frames that hold the honey combs in straight vertical rows. The bees build their combs along each frame. And all frames are removable from the top, allowing for easy access to the honey, inspections of hives,  and making it easy to split the bee colony into two.

Langstroth hives are rectangular in shape and are made from varying materials. Supers (the box that holds the frames) can be stacked on top of each other to enlarge the hive, as the supers don’t have tops or bottoms.

The other modern and popular beehive is the  ”top-bar hive”, also called the Kenya hive.  The Top Bar hive only has a top bar for the bees to build their combs from. In other words, there is no structure for the bees to build their combs on. This design is more close in nature to the way bees build their hives in the wild.

The top-bar were created as a low cost alternative to the Langstroth hives. The are very popular in third world countries because of they are simpler to build and cost less to construct. These types of hives also have removable frames. Although today there is a growing number of U.S. bee keepers who love them and are promoting their use.

The top-bar is a single long box (as opposed to the Langstroth’s vertical stacking) with all frames hanging in a long single row. Because the top bar doesn’t have a 4-sided frame structure, it can’t be put in a centrifuging machine to extract honey. The bees also have to rebuild the comb from scratch after each harvest, therefore using this type of hive yields more beeswax but less honey.

There are other types of bee hives that are in use, such as the National hive (which is the most popular in the United Kingdom), the WBC hive, the Dartington Long Deep hive, and the newest beehive creation, the Beehaus.

So what’s the best bee hive to use? The answer from most people will be the Langstroth or the top bar. Although the Beehaus sounds pretty interesting and may be a contenter in the years to come.

Here’s the basic random facts on honey bees for those of you thinking about starting a bee keeping apiary, in no particular order:

• For the honey bee, there are only seven recognized species, within these there are 44 subspecies.

• Of the 7 species the best-known is the European honey bee, which is one of the few that produces honey.

• Bees have a long tongue, called a proboscis, that lets them collect nectar from flowers and other plants.

• Apis Mellifera, known in common terms as the Western Honeybee, is the most commonly kept honey bee in the Americas and in Europe.

• A strong beehive will have between ten to twenty thousand foragers.

• The honey bee evolved from the wasp family about 100 million years ago.

• Honey bees are not native to the American continent. They were brought over by settlers in the 1600s.

• The queen bee can lay up to 2,000 eggs a day.

• The first two bees to be brought over by colonists were the Dark bee (A. m. mellifera), and then the  Italian bee (A. m. ligustica).

• The only honey bee to be used extensively for commercial pollination in U.S. crops and plants is Apis mellifera, means means “honey carrying bee”.

• Most bees, including the honey bee, have fuzzy bodies and carry an electrostatic charge, which helps the pollen stick to the body.

• The most popular and common honey bee in the U.S. is the Italian Honey Bee.

• The most misunderstood and feared honey bee is the Africanized Honey Bee.

• Common predators to the honey bee are dragonflies, kingbirds, beewolves, and mockingbirds.

• Every continent – except Antarctica – is home to the Honey Bee.

• It is believed that the Honey bees species originated in South and South East Asia.

• Worker bees live only nine days if their main task is heaving foraging. They are literally worked to death.

• Worker bees who have menial tasks within the hive will, on average, live up to three weeks.

• There are over 20,000 known species in the overall bee family. Of those, only four are classified as honeybees (Apis Cerana, Apis Florae, Apis Dorsata, and Apis Mellifera).

• The little honey bee is the third insect in the world to have its genome mapped. Which tells you just how important the worker insect is to our survival

• In 2007 European Honey Bee colonies in North America began dieing off at alarming rates (30 to 70% of commercial bee hives). This decline is unmatched in history and has scientists working to figure out the cause. It is now called “Colony Collapse Disorder.”

• Some races of honeybees that are available to prospective beekeepers include:  Africanized Honey Bee, Buckfast Honey Bee, Carniolan Honey Bee, Caucasian Honey Bee, Cordovan Honey Bee, Western European Honey Bee, Italian Honey Bee, Midnite Honey Bee, Russian Honey Bee, Starline Honey Bee, and Yugo Honey Bee, among others. Each bee race has different pros and cons.

Other Honey Bee Topics:
What Bees Eat
Apiculture Bee Keeping
Apiculture Bee Keeping Fun
Flowers For Bees

Most people know what bees eat, don’t they? I thought so until I had some people ask me that question. So here’s some basic facts about honey bees and what they consume in order to produce that delicious honey that we all love.

Honey bees forage for nectar and pollen. They will fly up to six miles away to find plants that they can gather pollen and nectar. They do this in several ways. Bees are furry little creatures with lots of hairs on their bodies. They even have hairs on their eyes. These hairs help trap pollen when they move among the plants.

The pollen sticks to the hairs and are then transferred onto the back legs where they rest in a pollen “basket”. When they return to the hive they can be seen carrying large yellow or greenish balls of pollen that hang from their hind leg area. (As seen in the photo at left.)

Worker bees move from flower to flower,  inadvertently spreading pollen to different plants as they go. Many plants depend on honey bees to pollinate them so they can grow. Without bees pollinating plants we would not have vegetables such as squash and cucumbers; fruits like watermelon, plums, apples, or sweet cherries; or nuts like almonds and sunflowers, to mention just a few.

A yellowish/greenish powder-like substance, pollen can e quite sticky, and contains the male contribution to the next generation of plants. The pollen is mixed with nectar to form “bee bread” that is a rich protein food that is used to feed the growing larvae and other members of the colony.

Nectar is the sweet fluid produced by flowers. Worker bees drink the nectar they find on flowers and plants, and store it in the crop, a pouch-like structure. When they get back to the hive the nectar is passed onto another bee who then holds it on her tongue to help the water evaporate.  The bee then mixes the nectar with enzymes and stores the nectar in  cells where it remains exposed to the air so the water can continue to evaporate.

After the water has evaporated and the bees now have created HONEY, the cells are capped with beeswax for future use. So what are we really eating when we eat honey? Evaporated nectar that’s been regurgitated from a honey bee’s special “stomach” and enhanced with bee enzymes. Doesn’t sound to tastey when you put it that way.

The honey is used in winter months by the bees to survive until spring time comes. So its important that bee keepers doesn’t take all the honey at the end of the season because that’s what bees eat to survive the winters.

Other Honey Bee Topics:

Apiculture Bee Keeping

Apiculture Bee Keeping Fun

Flowers For Bees

Facts On Bees

Apiculture bee keeping is a wonderful hobby (and business for some) that has been practiced for thousands of years. Honey bees can be easily raised and are wonderful at reproducing themselves into huge numbers, so that over time owners end up with lots of bee hives, and massive amounts of fresh honey.

The term apiculture comes from the Latin apis, which means bee, and is used to describe the maintenance and keeping of bees.

The practice of honey collection and beekeeping dates back to the stone-age. We know this because cave painting have been found in Spain (and other places) that date back to 6000 B.C., which depict  people collecting honey from bee hives.

In fact, the artwork to the left is from a book called Tacuina Sanitatis, a medieval handbook on health and wellbeing,  that was created in the 14th century.

Beekeeping arrived in the U.S. around the 1600s, and in the 1860s the first beekeeping system was brought to the U.S. by a native Pennsylvanian named John Harbison.

Bee keeping became very popular during the Great Depression and WWI when sugar was expensive and scarce. Bee hives could be ordered from the Sears & Roebuck catalog. Wild bees were readily found in many trees  and transferred to the newly ordered bee hives.

Unfortunately, bee keeping has declined sharply over the decades. Although beekeeping appears to be on the rise again, due to Colony Collapse Disorder and concerned people wanting to help the bees survive.

Honey harvesting is the number one reason for apiculture bee keeping,  but other items can be  harvested from honey bees as well; including royal jelly and propolis, which  is considered a  medicinal.

Honey bees also produce pollen and bees wax that can be turned into products that command a good price in the local and national markets. Bee pollen is considered wonderful for the skin. Bees wax is a favorite among candle makers and people who enjoy collecting and using beautiful candles.

The majority of beekeepers (or apiarist) live in rural areas. There are still cities and town that outlaw bee keeping and apiaries (bee hive locations), to the dismay of many beekeeping societies who promote the hobby. New York City made national headlines in 2010 when it reversed its beekeeping ban. Apiculture proponents across the country have raised the cry to make beekeeping legal in all cities -  this in the wake of the Colony Collapse Disorder.

Luckily “urban beekeeping” has been on the rise since the early 2000s, with London, Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, and Washington, D.C. being among the biggest beekeeping cities.

From a permaculture perspective, bees can benefit any system and environment they are added to. They help pollinate crops and provide honey and bees wax to those who take the time to invest in them. They are a rich sustainable resource that the world cannot replace if lost.

Its more important now then ever that people again begin to take up apiculture bee keeping. And in an increasingly uncertain economic future, its a smart choice.

Other Honey Bee Topics:

Apiculture Bee Keeping Fun

Flowers For Bees

Facts On Bees

What Bees Eat

Apiculture bee keeping is a wonderful hobby. Hundreds of thousands of back yard bee keepers all over the world say its changed their lives for the better. In the video below, one happy bee keeper shows us what to put into the bee smoker and how to smoke the bee hive super. He also says his bees are wild and he found them by the Las Angelos airport, which I got a good laugh out of. He’s obviously having fun with his bee keeping hobby.

Apiculture bee keeping video:

There are many different types of flowers for bees to make their honey from. The types of flowers that honey bees get nectar from will have an effect on the color and taste of the honey.

For example, honey from clover produces a very light colored honey; honey from buckwheat is very dark, almost black; blueberry produces a dark amber honey, and star thistle produces an amber colored honey. Although looking at the honey color alone will not tell you what the nectar source is or if it is a combination of nectar sources.

In the U.S. many of the big commercial bee farms do no distinguish the types of honey. It all just goes into big barrels despite where and what kinds of flowers the honey bees got their nectar from. Honey that is made from one specific type of plant will generally sell for a higher price. Something to keep in mind if you have enough land to plant specific types of crops for your honey bees.

Some plants and flowers for bees that are among their favorites include: alfalfa, skunk cabbage, linden, tulip poplar, evodia, anise hyssop, dandelions, catnip, willows, pussy willows, sourwood, catalpa, buckwheat, mountain mint, clover,  and canola, to name just a few.

The number one crop in the U.S. for honey bees is clover, of which there are many different kinds.

Its hard to say just which plants and flowers will be best for your honey bees because plants and seasons vary so wildly depending upon where you live. To decide which are the best plants and flowers for bees in your area, a small bit of research will be in order.

But here are a few honey bee plants and their characteristics for the kind of honey they produce.

Honeysuckle (Diervilla Lonicera)
Over 150 species of honeysuckles exists in the Northern Hemisphere.  There are many different varieties that grow in different regions of the U.S. at different times of the year. All of which produce nectar and pollen.
Honeysuckle honey is a light amber, is slow to granulate, and has a mild flavor.

Alsike Clover (Trifolium hybridum)
Alsike clover grows in the northern regions of the United States and Canada.  According to Frank Pellett’s book American Honey Plants Alsike clover is one of the very best for producing honey. The honey has a whitish color to it, is mild in flavor and  granulates slowly.  All other honeys are compared to the clover honey.  The Alsike clover produces very heavy yields of honey.

Apples (Malus species)
This includes many varieties of apples and crab apples. Apple trees grows in temperate regions of the U.S. and Canada. The honey that comes from apple trees tends to be a pale yellow and granulates quickly. However, honey bees tend to like using the pollen and nectar in raising the brood and there is usually very little left over.

Clover (Trifolium species)
Clover is an incredibly valuable honey plant as it is the major source of honey production in the U.S. . There are many different species. Some types of clover include Crimson Clover (Trifolium incarnatum),
Red Clover (Trifolium pratense), and White Clover (Trifolium repens). Honey from clover is white or nearly white.  It has a very mild flavor and does not granulate easily.

Buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum)
Buckwheat is  cultivated in the north temperate zones. It is a late crop that is sometimes planted when other crops can not be planted.  Bees love buckwheat and will eagerly work a buckwheat field and produce a large amount of honey from it. Buckwheat  honey is very dark in color and has a strong taste.  It is in large demand today because it is no longer grown as it once was and is a favorite of many people.  It granulates slowly.

Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale)
Dandelions are not native to the Americas but were introduced from Europe and have now naturalized all over North America. Bees love dandelions and will work hard to gather the nectar from this bright yellow flower which creates an abundance of pollen and nectar. Honey produced from the nectar is dark and strong, and granulates in a week or two. Most of this honey is consumed in the production of early brood.

If you’re a gardener and enjoy lots of gardening then you might want to think about planting flowers (both imported and native wild flowers) that bees love in your garden. Not only will it help your honey bees but your garden will look and smell fabulous. Be sure to plant flowers that bloom at different times throughout the spring, summer and fall to provide nectar and pollen throughout the season for your bees.

Here are some more bee friendly plants and flowers to consider planting for your honey bees. Some flowers that bloom in early spring are Witch Hazels, Daphne, Crocus, and Anemone. Other good plants for bees include: Echium, Elderberry, Goldenrod, Borage, Tansy, and Coltsfoot to name just a few. Again, its best to do a little research to see what types of bee friendly flowers will grow in your specific location.

More information and a list of the best flowers and plants for bees can be found by clicking the link.

Other Honey Bee Topics:
What Bees Eat
Apiculture Bee Keeping
Apiculture Bee Keeping Fun
Facts On Bees