Beekeeping for Beginners: How to Be a Successful Beekeeper!
- 9 hours on-demand video
- 11 downloadable resources
- 1 Practice Test
- Full lifetime access
- Access on mobile and TV
- Certificate of Completion
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Try Udemy for Business- Students will learn about the history of beekeeping and collecting honey for food.
- They will have a firm understanding about why honey bees are dying and how to help them.
- Students will learn the cost/time commitment, equipment needed, and everything else they need to know to become a beekeeper.
- Students will know what state and local regulations they should research before placing hives on their property.
- Students will learn about the primary breeds of honey bees used by beekeepers, and about their basic physiology.
- Students will know where to buy their own honey bees.
- Students will learn about the main types of hives used by beekeepers.
- Students will know what basic beekeeping equipment they need and where to buy it from reputable suppliers.
- Students will also know how to setup their hives and put their bees into them.
- They will learn about the different diseases and parasites that affect honeybees, and how to treat them.
- Students will learn the annual hive maintenance schedule used by beekeepers, and what they should be looking for during each season of the year.
- They will have a solid understanding of how to manage the hives and inspect them on a regular basis.
- They will know when and how to extract the honey from the hives, process it, and bottle it for sale.
- Students should have an interest in becoming a beekeeper and learning all the basics required to be successful at beekeeping.
- Students should be interested in finding out what they can do to help save honey bees.
- Individuals who are interested in a hobby where the learning never stops will love this course!
- Successful students will not mind being outdoors and getting hot.
- Students who know that they are allergic to honey bees SHOULD NOT take this course. Beekeeping is not a hobby for someone who is allergic to bee stings.
At Queen Bri's Honey, we are 5th generation beekeepers, and our entire family is involved in our beekeeping operation. Let us teach you how to be beekeepers!
Whether your interest in beekeeping is as a hobby, because your grandpa once kept bees when you were growing up, or you think this might be a cool little side business, this course will help get you started on your new adventure as a beekeeper!
In this course, you will learn everything you need to know about getting started as a beekeeper. By the time you finish this course, you will have learned all about each of the topics listed below, and you will be ready to get started out in your own beekeeping adventure.
With 44+ lessons and 9+ hours of instruction, there is a ton of information packed into this course. In fact, this course contains even more information than my 2- day in-person Beginner Beekeeping class that I conduct!
We will cover the following topics:
History of Beekeeping
Benefits of Bees
Decline of the Honeybee Population
Zoning, Neighbors, Family Support, Costs, and Time Considerations
What You Need to Do Before You Start Beekeeping
Types of Honey Bees
Obtaining Your Bees
How Bees Communicate and Make Honey
Honey Bee Life Cycle - Honeybee Jobs & How Queens are Made
Types of Hives
Selecting a Location for Your Hives
Protecting Your Hives With Raised Stands and Fencing
Basic Beekeeping Equipment - What You Need and What's Optional
Video Demo: Basic Beekeeping Equipment
Video Demo: How to Build Your Equipment for Your Bees Arrival
How to Install Your Bees into Their New Hive
Video Demo: How to Install Packages of Bees
Do's and Don'ts Before Visiting Your Hives
How Often to Inspect Your Hive Throughout the Year
Video Demo: How to Light Your Smoker
Video Demo: How to Suit Up to Prevent Getting Stung
How to Inspect a Beehive - Inside and Out
Video Demo: How to Inspect Your New Beehive
What to Expect Your First 12 Months
Beekeeping Calendar: How Beekeeping Inspections Change Throughout the Year
How Nectar Flow and Bloom Cycles Affect Your Bees
Common Hive Problems
Potential Hive Diseases
Honeybee Pests - Prevention and Treatment
Honey Harvest - Honey Extraction Equipment Needed & How to Harvest Your Honey
Honey Label Requirements
Cleaning Up Your Beeswax to Make Bee Products With It
When and How to Prepare Your Hives for Winter
Video Demo: Preparing Your Hives For Winter
This class uses multiple learning formats, from PowerPoint slides, to handouts, to on-site video demonstrations in one of our apiaries (bee yard) so that the information can be easily learned no matter your preferred learning style.
If you have any questions during or after the course, you are always more than welcome to contact me. I am so excited to help you get started as a beekeeper, and I look forward to hearing stories about your new beekeeping adventures!
- This course is for someone who is interested in learning all the basics of becoming a beekeeper, the equipment needed, and how to run a successful apiary.
- Beginner beekeepers who are wanting to reinforce skills or who want to further their current beekeeping skills.
- People who cannot make it to an in-person beekeeping class due to time constraints or lack of a local class to take.
Welcome to Queen Bri's Honey Farm "Beekeeping 101 for Beginners" online training class! This class is for students interested in becoming beekeepers or who have been beekeeping for less than one year. If you've been beekeeping for more than one year, this course will most likely be more of a refresher course for you. If you are looking for more intermediate or advanced beekeeping topics, this course does not cover those.
In section, I'll tell you a little bit more about Queen Bri's Honey Farm and give you some ideas to use in your own apiary, whether you are wanting to become a hobby beekeeper or are looking for an unusual way to make a little bit of cash on the side.
Beekeeping is one of the oldest documented human activities. Cave art depicts humans harvesting honey over 8,000 years ago, and beekeeping is an agricultural practice as old as the Pharoahs in Egypt. Throughout the world, mankind has sought the golden sweet nectar produced by honeybees for thousands of years.
In this section, you will learn more about how beekeeping began, and the rise of modern beekeeping as we now know it.
In this lecture, we discuss why honeybees are struggling to survive, and why the number of hives worldwide is half of what it was in the mid-1900s. You will be asked this question all the time once you become a beekeeper, so don't skip this section! If you do, you won't be able to answer one of the Top 5 questions you'll be asked most by people once you become a beekeeper.
In this less, we will discuss possible zoning restrictions you might encounter that prevent you from keeping bees on your property or that might limit the number of hives you can have, or how they are placed. We will also discuss the necessity of taking your family's and neighbors' concern about you keeping bees seriously. And, finally we discuss how much it will cost to get started as a beekeeper and how much time it will take up per month, on average.
We'll discuss what when you can start beekeeping (unless you live in a warm climate year-round, there are only certain times of the year that you can get started as a beekeeper). We will also discuss how important it is to get connected with mentors and local beekeeping associations.
In this lesson, we will discuss the most popular breeds of honeybees that people like to keep as beekeepers. We will discuss their positives and negatives, and where they do well in certain parts of the world. This will help you decide what kind of honeybee you want to purchase for your apiary.
In this lesson, you'll learn about how bees communicate with one another. Bees contain more odor receptors than fruit flies or mosquitoes, and they communicate with each other primarily through the scents of various pheromones they each produce. We will also discuss how bees turn nectar into that delicious tasting liquid gold - honey!
It is very important to understand the honey bee life cycle. Much of what you do to manage your hives in the future will revolve around your basic understanding of the various jobs of bees within the hive and their life expectancy. It will also impact whether or not you can conduct a good hive inspection, so don't skip this lesson!
One of the most important decisions you can make when becoming a beekeeper is the site selection for your hives. This will impact how much honey your bees can make, how much honey you can harvest, how many hives you can have in that location, how much water your bees will be able to access, how safe the location is for both the honeybees as well as you and your family, and how much of a bother your honeybees will be to your neighbors.
Humans are not the only thing you have to worry about stealing your hives or honey. Throughout the world, there are many animals that have no fear of honeybees, and will destroy the hives to get to the honey inside or who love to eat bees (like skunks). This lesson discusses some of the ways that you can protect your honeybees and your investment from both humans and wildlife.
We will discuss all of the basic beekeeping equipment you'll need to get started, which of it is required and which of it is optional. And, we will discuss what each piece of equipment is called (some by many different names) and what it is used for in beekeeping.
In this lesson, we will show you how we build some of the equipment that we use in our apiaries ourselves. Some of this equipment is so easy to make, that if you have the tools to build it, you'll save a lot of money by just building it yourself.
In this lesson, we will show you how we prepped our hives before installing some of our packages of bees we purchased. We then walk you through step-by-step how to install the bees into your new hive. You'll be a pro at installing bees after watching this video!
This is a very important lesson that should not be skipped. Bees have rules that must be followed, or you will most certainly suffer the consequences of getting stung. Make sure you print out the attached checklist. Read it. Know it. Memorize it. It is very important that this information because second nature to recall.
Throughout the year, unless you live in a part of the world where the seasons are consistently the same year round, the number of times per month you should be checking on your hives will vary greatly. Get familiar with the attached checklist, and contact your local beekeeper association to make sure that this checklist accurately reflects how often other beekeepers in your area are inspecting their hives. Inspection frequency is highly dependent upon the weather conditions and nectar flow in your area, so everything on this checklist might not be exactly the same for your area.
Lighting your smoker so that it stays lit is often a challenge to new beekeepers. It's not as easy as it seems it should be because the smoke cannot be from burning wood. It has to be from material that burns cool and white. In this video, we'll show you how we light our smoker.
During your first 12 months as a beekeeper, it is very important to keep your expectations of your honeybees and of yourself, as their beekeeper, in check. This lesson will help set your expectations of what you should be seeing the first few months all the way through to the first year of your beekeeping adventure with your new beehives.
During each month of the year (unless you are in a climate where the weather is consistently the same year-round), there will be different tasks you should be focused on doing with your beehives when you inspect your hives. This lesson discusses how your role as the beekeeper changes throughout the year. A checklist is also provided for you to print out. You should also contact both your local and regional beekeeper association groups to see if they have a Beekeeping Calendar that has been put together specifically for your area, as this checklist is for areas that have 4 well-defined seasons.
You will notice that the temperament of your bees, the color and flavor of your honey, and the amount of honey your bees collect is very dependent upon the local flora available to them. This lesson discusses the importance of becoming very familiar with what is blooming year round in the area where you keep your bees so that you are familiar with what kind and how much pollen and nectar they are bringing into the hive.
In this lesson, we'll go over the essentials of how to conduct a hive inspection. After completing this lesson, you will know how to conduct a hive inspection and what it is you are looking for when you open up the outer cover of your hive box. Be sure to print out the attached checklist, and make sure you watch each of the videos below of hives inspections we conducted in our apiaries to help demonstrate how to inspect a hive. Once you have watched each of these videos, you should feel much more certain about inspecting your hives.
This hive inspection is with a swarm that we recently caught. The queen is doing a good job of laying, even in the middle of a hot dearth, in this hive.
This hive inspection is done on a hive that has an actively laying queen, but the bees are not happy with her egg laying patter or the amount of eggs she is laying. So, they have created queen supercedure cells to replace her. We will show you what these cells look like and discuss why the hive has decided to replace the queen.
There are different diseases that honeybees can contract, and it is very important to know how to recognize symptoms of these diseases so that you can react to them properly. When treatable, we will teach you how to treat some of the diseases you may encounter, and if not treatable, we will discuss what your next steps should be.
Pests inside and outside your beehives will be something that you will deal with frequently as a beekeeper. It is important not to get frustrated by these pests. Instead, you should know what steps you can take to prevent them from becoming a pest in your hives and how to get rid of them if they are already in your hives.