We love pollinators at our house. They are so vital to our food supply, environment, and ecosystems that we have tried to always have some type of native plant that benefits butterflies and bees in our yard. They are especially helpful in pollinating my garden and fruit trees so I want as many around as possible. When we still lived in the suburbs we dreamed of keeping honeybees in the yard, but even though we rocked the boat by having backyard chickens, we didn’t think the neighbors would accept beehives around. Once we moved to the country though, it was on.
(Disclaimer: Matt and I are by no means experts on beekeeping, but I wanted to share our amateur “beek” experiences to encourage others. We are super lucky that we have a thriving beekeeping community in our area and have found valuable local resources.)
Early in 2016, we started researching the different options and equipment for starting a hive and placed our order for all of the supplies and bees through a local apiary. We attended a “Beekeeping 101” class from a local honey company, where we learned about hive care, honey extraction, and suited up to check out some hives. Of course, we also scoured the internet and bought books to help us along the way. (We love The Bee Book.)
To start keeping bees you will need some basic equipment and to select what method of “starter kit” is best for you to obtain the bees themselves. I recommend having at least two (or more) suits, sets of gloves, hive tools, and smokers so you can have someone help you.
(I always recommend purchasing locally, but have linked to items on Amazon for easy reference. Please note these are affiliate links, if you purchase from one of these links I will receive a small commission to support our beekeeping and homesteading, at no additional charge to you. I tried to find the exact items we use when available, but have chosen the most similar I could find when the exact one wasn’t listed.)
The equipment must haves include the following items:
- Bee Suit – VENTILATED VENTILATED VENTILATED, spring for the ventilated version especially if you live in a hot climate. You will still be hot and sweaty, but you can get a breeze. I recommend visiting a shop if at all possible to try them on because the sizing varies so much. For instance, in our class I wore a medium and Matt wore a large, so those are the sizes we ordered. I can barely walk in my medium because it is so big, but the large one Matt ordered fits me fine – ugh.
- Gloves
- Hive Tool
- Frame Lifter
- Smoker
- Smoker Fuel (dried horse manure, cotton, fuel pellets, burlap, pine shavings, you name it)
- 1-2 Deep Supers (Langstroth) or you might buy a starter kit that includes these, plus the following:
- Bottom Board
- Entrance Reducer
- Top Board/Top
- Feeder – this one is compatible with a regular mouth Mason jar
- Hive Beetle Traps with oil to fill them
- Queen Excluder (after you have filled your bottom two deep supers)
- Extra Frames are always great to have, some people buy them pre-made, or you can make your own (we prefer ones that have beeswax foundation, instead of the plastic foundation)
- Hive Stand – there are lots of options for this, we use cinder blocks, other people have nice welded metal stands, there are lots of options.
- Bees (see below for info on bee options)
In our area people usually pick up their bees around April-May. Due to severe weather and flooding, the apiary we purchased from had to delay our pick up until June because many of their hives were damaged. We decided to go with a “nuc” (short for nucleus hive) of Italian honeybees to get started. A nuc is a starter “hive-in-a-box” if you will, it includes five frames of worker bees, honey, pollen, and brood, along with a queen. (The Italian bees are popular because they are extremely docile and resistant to disease.) When you go with this option you will pick up the box of bees and bring them home where you have your hive and empty frames waiting. We use Langstroth hives (the square stacking-box style), so to install our bees we placed the five full frames from the nuc in the middle of the bottom deep super (a super is what you call the boxes in beekeeper speak) and then added the remaining five empty frames to the outside edges. Be sure to dump any lingering bees into the hive and check to be sure your queen isn’t still hanging out in the nuc box or outside the hive. (The queen may or may not be marked by the company you purchased her from, be sure to ask as this helps you in ID’ing her in the crowd.)
You can also purchase “packages” of bees, which are a box of bees and a queen without the frames a nuc has. This is similar to if you caught a wild swarm and installed them in your own hive. Some apiaries also offer “colonies” which is an entire deep super filled with the hive instead of the five frames you get with a nuc. We found the nuc to be the most cost effective and easiest option for a novice beekeeper.
We fed the bees a sugar-water “nectar” mixture for the first week or so to help get them established in their new home, starting with a 2:1 sugar to water ratio and reducing to a 1:1 ratio before pulling the feeder altogether. You may select to feed during the winter with one of these mixtures as well to supplement their honey stores if they have not built up enough for the season. We made the decision to pull the feeder when we saw they were greedily filling and capping their frames with the clear sugar-water instead of nectar/pollen.
One thing I recommend is to really scout out the best spot for your bees BEFORE bringing them home. This sounds like a no-brainer, but we initially placed ours under a few mesquite trees farther away from the house. We noticed that even though they were under tree cover they were being baked by the sun which made us super uncomfortable when we were inspecting the hives (hello, Texas heat in a bee suit…), needless to say we did not leave them there. We decided to move them closer to our “chicken yard” where there is nice shade cover and no one really walks around. To make the move we waited until nightfall (most are in for the night and usually stay in the hive after dark), donned our suits, stuffed an old t-shirt in the entrance of the hive to prevent escape, and loaded the whole hive in one piece in the back of our UTV. I sat in the back holding it steady while we drove it to its new location. Whenever you move a hive (or install a new one from a nuc) lay a couple of twigs or brush across the entrance, this helps them re-calibrate their internal GPS system and they will find the hive again. We did have a few stragglers who took a while to figure out the move, but all in all everyone did well.
The goal for your hive’s first year, our’s at least, is to fill the two bottom large supers with brood and food for the hive. This way you ensure your hive is strong and can survive the winter on their own food stores. We did not take any honey from these ladies in 2016, but in the Summer of 2017 we extracted approximately 16 lbs of honey from them!
Getting started with beekeeping can be exciting, nerve wracking, expensive, and absolutely fascinating. It has not always been smooth sailing, and in my next post I will discuss our processes, the end of Year One, and the struggles Year Two has brought.
Are there any specific questions you have about beekeeping? Do you have your own hives? What are your beekeeping goals?