Understanding the Basics
Begin your beekeeping education and learn some basics. Find a suitable beehive location. When your bees arrive in the spring (typically April), you’ll install your hive. The minimum cost to start beekeeping with one beehive is about $760 for the first year. One set of hive components costs around $270.
Beekeeping is a fulfilling and possibly lucrative hobby. The most significant learning curve is finding the delicate balance between keeping an eye on your bees without invading their space too often. Beekeeping is not a particularly expensive hobby, but you will have more expenses in the first year when starting out, learning how to keep bees and buying the various pieces of equipment that you need. After that, the yearly cost will be a lot less. Be prepared to spend about $500 – $700 /£350 – £500 initially on equipment, a training course, and the bees themselves.
To start beekeeping, you’ll need to get a hive from a local beekeeping supplier. You’ll also want to get a bee suit for protection, a smoker for calming the bees, and a hive tool for reaching inside the hive.
The advantages of buying a nuc when starting beekeeping is that the bees are already starting to produce comb and honey when you bring them home. You simply put on your bee protective clothing and transfer the ten frames from the cardboard box, into your hive. The colony has already accepted the queen, and they have mated with her so you have varying ages of brood ready to mature and take over as older bees die out.
Collecting Honey and Maintaining Your Hive
Use the following procedure if you don’t have access to a professional extractor. The bees usually build up their hive during the first year, and if they overwinter properly, you may start collecting honey in the late spring or early summer of the second year.
Welcome to the backyard beekeeping community! Before breeding bees, you should acquire basic knowledge in order to subsequently apply them in practice. It’s vital to start studying with the physiology of Hymenoptera and understand apiary structure principles. So get basic information from scientific beekeeping literature.
Starting Your Beekeeping Journey
Hopefully, by now, you understand how to start as a beekeeper and the positive impact it can have on your life. Their comfort is your priority, so keep your eye on the bees themselves.
Ordering bees from a supplier is a great way to start small, rather than with a large, established, hive. Experienced beekeepers find it thrilling to collect their bees in a more natural way by catching swarms. Beekeeping requires a basic understanding of how bees make honey and what colonies require to thrive. Another thing to consider is incorporating bees into your life time-wise.
How Many Hives to Start With
Start with two hives. Here’s why:
- With two, you can compare them. If both act similarly, it’s likely normal.
- If one hive is weak, equalize by moving bees.
- If one loses a queen, give it a frame of brood from the other to make a new queen.
With one hive, these practices aren’t possible.