United States Home And Prepared By Department Of Garden Bulletin Science And Agriculture Number 158 Education Administration

Keeping honey bees is a fascinating and profitable pastime that can be enjoyed in several ways. You may want to keep bees for the delicious fresh honey they produce, for the benefits of their valuable services as pollinators for your crops, or perhaps just for the fun of learning about one of nature's most interesting insects.

You can keep honey bees successfully almost anywhere in the United States with relatively little trouble and a minimum of expense. This bulletin supplies you with the basic information you should have to get started. As a beginning beekeeper, you will need only. A few dollars invested in materials.

. A suitable location for beehives.

. Elementary knowledge of the habits of honey bees.

Beekeeping Equipment

The basic equipment you need for beginning beekeeping should cost no more than about $80. This equipment should include the following items:

Hive, to house your bees.

Frames, and foundation to support the honeycombs in which your bees will store honey and raise young bees.

Smoker, to blow smoke into the hive to pacify the bees when you want to work with them.

Hive tool, with which to pry frames apart to examine the hive or harvest the honey.

Veil, to protect your face and neck from bee stings.

Gloves, to protect your hands.

Feeder, to dispense sugar sirup until bees can produce their own food.

Colony Life

Honey bees are social insects. This means that they live together in a colony and depend on each other for survival.

Most of the bees in a colony are workers (sterile females). Some are drones (males), whose only function is to mate with the queen. Usually there is one queen bee (fertile female) in the colony; she lays the eggs that maintain or increase the colony's population.

The honey bee (Apis mellifera Linnaeus) is man's most useful insect. In the United States alone, honey bees produce about $100 million worth of honey and beeswax each year, and they pollinate more than $2 billion worth of valuable agricultural crops.

Equipment used in beekeeping.

Worker bees (sexually undeveloped females) number as many as 60, 000 per colony, depending on the egg-laying ability of the queen, the space available in the hive for expansion, and the incoming food supply. Worker bees live about 6 weeks. They collect food and water for the entire colony, do the housework, and guard the hive against intruders. They also "air condition" the hive and maintain a fairly constant hive temperature and humidity- whatever the conditions outside. Although worker bees do not mate, they may lay eggs if the colony loses its queen. But their eggs will not keep up the colony population, because the eggs develop only into drones.

The number of drones (males) in a colony varies with the season of the year. There may be none during the winter, but several hundred during the summer. They are driven out of the hive in the fall, when worker bees can no longer collect food.

The queen bee normally flies from the hive when she is about a week old and mates in the air with several drones. When she returns to the hive, she begins to lay eggs. During her lifetime she lays thousands of eggs-sometimes as many as 1, 000 in a day. She puts each egg into a separate cell of the honeycomb.

Three days after an egg is laid, it hatches into a larva. Worker bee "nursemaids" feed and care for the larva for days. Then they seal the cell. Inside the honeycomb cell the larva transforms into a pupa. Twenty days from the day the egg was laid, an adult worker bee chews her way out of the cell.

Bee Strains

The Italian strain of bees is the most common one in the United States. These bees are hardy, industrious, relatively gentle, and yellow to brown in color.

The Caucasian strain is also widely kept. Bees in this strain are more gentle than Italian bees, and grey to black in color.

Caucasian bees sometimes use an excessive amount of propolis in their hives. They collect this gummy substance from buds and injured tree parts, and they use it as a "cement" in their hives.

From left: Worker, queen, and drone bees.

Frames that become heavily propolized are difficult to remove.

Some specially bred hybrid bees (crosses between two or more bee strains) are available. They are usually more productive than standard strains. But after a year or two, the offspring they produce may bear no resemblance to the original hybrid bees.

If you keep hybrid bees, it is a good idea to replace your queen each year. This should assure a uniformly strong colony.

Getting Started

The best time to start keeping bees is in springtime. Fruit trees and flowers are in bloom then and should supply the new colony with sufficient nectar and pollen.

Buy a hive and the necessary equipment before springtime. When it is assembled, you can buy a package of 2 or 3 pounds of bees with a queen from another beekeeper or from a bee supplier and put them into your hive. Be sure the bees you buy have a certificate of inspection to indicate that they are free of bee diseases.

Another way to begin keeping honey bees is to capture a live swarm and establish it in your hive. However, unless you have experience, don't try to catch the swarm by yourself. Try to have a beekeeper help you.

If you begin with a new swarm or package of bees, it is a good idea to provide them with a sugar sirup that is a mixture of half sugar and half water. You can put this sirup in a feeder in the en trance of the beehive. The sirup will supply food until the bees can make and store their own honey.