Sustainable Beekeeping for Beginners using Natural methods

Students will have a good idea of what products honeybees produce, what these products can be made into and the world market and industries that work with them.

This course introduces the new beekeeper to the various types of hives used in beekeeping with their Pros and Cons as far a Natural beekeeping is concerned. It also suggests some of the protective clothing and tools that will be required. At the end of this lesson the student will be in a position to decide what they need to work with.

In this lecture we take you through all the important choices that you must consider when selecting your Apiary site. Putting Hives in the wrong place can make or break your attempt at your first beekeeping experience. We also talk about moving or transporting bees in a safe manner.

Although wearing a bee suit protects you from most stings there is always that one bee you did not notice. Stings come with the business. The last part of this lecture is very important as it gives the student an introduction to what can happen when you get stung, how to reduce the chance of being stung and also the symptoms of allergic reactions.   

An understanding of the classification of honeybees is important for the beekeeper to understand. It is like learning the language of beekeeping so that you can start to understand that there are more than one race of honeybee each with traits that help it adapt to the environment that it lives in. We also look at a brief history of the honey bee with particular interest in the the fact that it has evolved for millions of years.

In this lesson we look at the development of the honeybee from egg to adult known as Complete metamorphosis. Then we go through the age Polyethism ( Division of Labor) of the adults. There are some interesting videos attached to this lesson that show the bees scenting the entrance of the hive and another showing pollen collection.

Here we talk about all the things you need to do before you start work on your, while your working on your hive and precautions to take with your smoker. Since we will be starting with vertical frame hives we show how to pull the frames in a safe and efficient manner to reduce stress on the bees and to limit crushing any of them between frames

In this section we continue to look at the things to look out for when we open a hive. We discuss the reasons for swarming, what swarm cells look like, and what emergency cells look like. We also look at feeding the bees with sugar vs. leaving honey for them.

NOTE: Please see in the  resources section, a correction to information about the amount of honey to leave on the Feeding Bees slide

In this lesson we discuss the Natural instinct of Honeybees to swarm and why this allows the bees to improve genetic traits that give them a better chance at survival. We will also discuss what beekeepers normally do in conventional beekeeping management to control the swarm instinct and why this is affecting the ability of the bees to select the genetics for their species to better survive the conditions, pests and stresses of our modern world.

In this the last lecture in this Beginners Beekeeping Program we talk about how to increase our Apiary size, how to catch swarms and how to make splits. We also discuss the marking of queens which is something that only really needs to be done is you are doing some form of record keeping