Beekeeping on the Homestead
Learn along with me on my beekeeping journey, as I share my personal experiences to avoid hive failure, as well as tips that lead to a healthy thriving colony.
I like the quote “If you like bees, build an apiary; if you like honey, find a friend who has an apiary.” Keeping bees is a fascinating and rewarding hobby, but can get very expensive and can be discouraging without the right equipment and mentorship.
You may not know it by the fact that I’ve loved keeping bees for five years, then this year, learning how to trap bees, but I have had a lifelong fear of the little buzzers. A bad run-in with a hornet nest as a kid left me terrified of any buzzing near my face my entire life.
A big part of growing up though is facing our fears, and doing something about them. When I got into homesteading, I decided a good way to deal with my fear of bees was to start beekeeping. I’d gotten WAY too into growing my own garden (and especially obsessed with growing my own fruit) to NOT have some local pollinators helping me out.
My quest to overcome my fears didn’t come without incident, though. The second year in, my bees nearly killed me, and… well, that certainly didn’t help me conquer my fears much.
As I was managing one of my hives, Howdy (my donkey, also known as the local building inspector) was doing what inspectors do best. He got a little too curious, got stung on the tush, and knocked over the entire hive which resulted in me getting stung over 70 times from the neck up. You see, when bees sting, it actually releases a pheromone that indicates to other bees nearby that there is some danger afoot. More and more bees will come to the defense of the hive, and will repeatedly sting the host of the original infraction until the hive is deemed “safe.” As soon as I realized I was in trouble, I ran, as fast as I could, to the pond behind our homestead. Thankfully, my mother-in-law got me in an ice bath, fed me full of Benadryl, and kept my body temperature down until I was out of the woods. Needless to say, that was a less than ideal experience, and that incident put me off of beekeeping for a while.
Types of Hives
Top Bar Style
I had initially used a top-bar style hive for my first hive. They tend to mimic nature a little better than the Langstroth style hives, but, as I learned my first winter with bees, are better suited to warmer, drier climates than Seattle.
In top bar hives, the bees build their comb in a top-down fashion so that you can lift the bar and break off the comb from the bottom, which makes collecting honey and comb a lot easier, but also means that the bees have to re-draw their comb every time you harvest, which takes a lot of time and energy, and in a less healthy hive, will mean less honey for you.
The extra airflow Langstroth hives offer made insulating the hive in a way that also avoided mold and excess moisture in Seattle’s cold, damp climate less than ideal. Despite my best efforts, that first hive did not survive the winter.
Langstroth Hive
After that failure, I decided to go with a Langstroth hive. This design provides more protection for the hives, and better chances for success in colder, wetter climates like the PNW. That second year, I decided to order two packages of bees. One made it through the winter, one of them was overcome with mites, and the hive collapsed.
After that much failure, and three years with no honey, a lot of people would have thrown in the towel, but I am stubborn, and if you’ve been hanging around here long, I think you probably already know that :).
Why Beekeeping?
Even when I was unable to harvest honey from my hives, having bees that close to my garden was extremely beneficial. Their presence (and my ever-improving soil) resulted in enormous crop yields in my garden and my fruit trees flourished.
When I was FINALLY able to harvest some honey in year four, I ALSO got a healthier sugar source for sweetener- in my tea, in my baking, in my morning yogurt… when you’ve got sugar literally growing on your farm, you find PLENTY of ways to use it.
I also used the honey in my soapmaking for its skin healing benefits, eating local honey is known to reduce seasonal allergies, and the shelf life of honey is potentially indefinite- did you know archaeologists found potable honey in Egyptian tombs???
A byproduct of harvesting honey is getting beeswax, which is also awesome, because, I use beeswax in my woodshop to lubricate my handplanes and in my wooden spoon finishes.
Tips for Beekeeping Success
As much as I love reading, there’s only so much about beekeeping you can learn from a book, and that’s why I’m such a huge proponent of finding a local beekeeping club. Beeks (beekeeping geeks) are EVERYWHERE, so ask around at your local feed store or check on Facebook for a beekeeping group near you.
Having an experienced mentor walk you through the process will increase your probability of success. I have been very fortunate to have my friend Craig, @thebarefootforge, constantly giving me unsolicited beekeeping advice ;).
Do some research to understand your climate and the best equipment to match that climate to allow your colony to thrive.
You can buy Langstroth hives at a farm store, or build them yourself. I have done both.
Langstroth hives are a standardized size, so if you need replacement parts quickly, you can run down to your local farm store. (This is actually yet another reason I like them, I built my top bar hives myself, and getting emergency parts was only possible if I had the time to stop and make them).
If you’re thinking about keeping bees, try catching a free swarm instead of (or in addition to) ordering them! I’ll teach you how to trap your own bees soon as I’m about to release a brand new video where I successfully captured a native bee colony on my property.
This post was originally published on December 5, 2018, and was updated on May 17, 2021.
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