I've been writing an article for my website that sets out a plan for starting as a treatment-free beekeeper. I was wondering what other treatment-free beekeepers thought of my ideas. This is just the text, there will be pictures. Enjoy.
How to start Beekeeping
This is a sensitive subject for many reasons. We’ve come to a time in beekeeping history when there are perhaps more people trying to start beekeeping and failing than ever before. This leads to a great number of disaffected former once upon a time newbee beekeepers. I don’t want this. I don’t know of any beekeeper or experienced beekeeper who doesn’t think this is a terrible thing. Beekeeping as a career is diminishing. Beekeeping is becoming harder to do and make money. And while I’m not terribly concerned about the maintenance of the commercial beekeeping profession, I am concerned about assuring that new beekeepers have a positive and fulfilling experience. So I’ve given this a lot of thought and I’ve come up with a plan and a philosophy that I haven’t heard from anyone else and I haven’t at the time of this writing told anyone else. I think it can help to make a difference and give the freshman treatment-free beekeeper a leg up on the status quo.
Before you get the bees
Guideline #1: Never purchase your bees in the same year as you decide to become a beekeeper.
What I’ve seen happen is every spring, a whole new crop of beekeepers come in and plop down their $200 for their starter kit with a deep hive body and a medium super and a veil and a smoker and a hive tool and the other little accessories that come along with it. Then they’ll plop down their $100 for their 3 lb. package of bees which due to some natural disaster will not be delivered on time. This throws the newbee into a nervous fit because everything is not working out exactly how they planned. Little do they know that this is the way of things and that they will subsequently receive a whole bunch more of the same. There are so many threads which start on Beesource.com which are something like the following: “Help!!! Something about this is going totally different than I expected!!!” It causes a whole lot of problems for queen and package producers.
So take the time. Take the time to study and prepare. This isn’t like buying a hamster. Bees are sophisticated insects. They shouldn’t need you to survive, and if they had the intellectual aptitude, they would most certainly reject you as their manager. Study. Never stop learning. Open your mind and if all else fails, simply do nothing. You can’t make it much worse by doing nothing. You can certainly make it worse by jumping the gun and doing the wrong thing.
Buy some good beekeeping books and read them cover to cover. I recommend “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Beekeeping” by Dean Stiglitz and Laurie Herboldsheimer and “The Practical Beekeeper” by Michael Bush. Michael’s book is much thicker and more expensive, but at the same time, virtually all of it is available on his website Bush Farms. Spend a lot of time there. You won’t regret it.
Guideline #2: Don’t start with just one hive.
There is simply too much to go wrong to consider this as an option these days. There really is a serious chance that one hive will die in its first winter. If it’s not due to mites, it could be due to related viruses or infections or it could be starvation or it could be a failed late season supersedure or it could be by robbing from neighborhood colonies. There are just so many things that could go wrong that first year. Additionally, having more than one hive gives you many options for helping out your other hives. Call it socialism or Robin Hooding or whatever, but it’s really helpful to be able to pull a frame of open brood out of a neighboring hive and be able to give it to a queenless hive so they can make their own queen. It’s also very helpful to be able to equalize stored honey in the fall when some hives may have more than they need and some may be a bit short.
When I started, I started with 20 packages. But that was back when packages cost $35 apiece whereas now, they may cost $100. That many would only be for the most serious of starting beekeepers as I was. I was intending to become a commercial beekeeper. I didn’t end up doing that, but I did learn a vital lesson. My recommendation is to start with no fewer than five hives. As to how to start them, I’ll deal with that in a minute.
Be serious. Starting with five hives is a serious investment and if you are wanting to be a treatment-free beekeeper, a serious investment is necessary, not only in bees and equipment but in study and planning. At this point in time treatment-free beekeeping WILL NOT WORK by buying bees and putting them in a hive and leaving them in the back yard. Do not be fooled. It is not as easy as that. There’s a reason most of the beekeeping community are still using treatments. Treatments help avoid big and immediate and hard to stomach losses. They are the easy way to do things and they do produce results, for a while. But as it has been shown over the years, eventually the effectiveness of the treatment wears off and then you’re still stuck with the same problem. To succeed in treatment-free beekeeping, much attentiveness and study and work is necessary. But it’s worth it, for you and for the bees, in the long run. Take it seriously.
What bees to get
Guideline #3: Start with nucs. (This means two things.)
Before you can get bees, you need something to put them in. As I mentioned before, newbees commonly jump on the internet or run down to their local beekeeping supply store and grab a beginner’s kit. Don’t do it. You don’t need all this stuff yet, and as far as I can tell, it’s overpriced anyway.
The first problem is, they give you the most expensive equipment, the ‘Select’ grade stuff. You don’t need this. It’s made specifically for people who don’t know any better. You want commercial grade stuff. It’s just as good, not as pretty, but it will be painted anyway. Second, you can’t pick your frame size and often foundation is included so you can’t pick cell size either. I will only ever recommend small cell or natural cell. You don’t need gloves. You don’t want an entrance feeder. You’re not going to want the tiny smoker they’ll give you. You don’t need inner and telescoping covers, you can use migratory or plywood or something simple. They’re not going to give you the kind of veil you want or need. You don’t need a screened bottom board. You don’t need the book they’re gonna give you and you don’t need their video, that’s what YouTube is for in this generation.
Some thinking is required.
The main thing you should decide right at this point is what size frame you’d like to deal with. Many Bee-ginner’s kits include two boxes with two different sizes of frames. However due to a lot of issues I discuss on the Size Considerations page, you should pick a single frame size, and generally speaking, I’d recommend the medium. I have used a single frame size in my entire beekeeping career and have never regretted it. All those frames were deeps and at times I have been disappointed with that choice but never the choice to use one size.
The next decision is what to purchase to start beekeeping. Your choices are in most cases to buy established hives, buy nucleus hives, or buy packages. There’s also the option of catching swarms which I heartily recommend at all stages of beekeeping, but it’s not really reliable as a method on acquiring bees. If you have the opportunity to buy established treatment-free hives pay whatever it takes. However, since that is a near impossibility, my recommendation is to purchase treatment-free nucs. Those are also few and far between, so the next best option is to purchase treatment-free package bees. But those are also hardly available. There are small cell versions of both those and that would be the next best option. If you get in early enough, you should be able to get small cell nucs without too much hassle. I got some from Dixie Bee Supply without too many problems a few years back.
Now for the second part of ‘Start with Nucs.’
Thus far, the things I have recommended are pretty standard. But the next part, I have never heard anyone talk about. I think you should do a year or two keeping only nucleus hives. I think you should increase as much as possible, I think you should overwinter them, and I think you can use them to continue to develop your treatment free operation long after you’ve switched to full size hives.
There’s a number of reasons why I think you should do this. First of all is cost. The cost of five five-frame nucs is significantly less than five hives with lids and bottoms. It gives you an excellent opportunity to make your own nucs and pretty good quality ones for $5 each. That’s right, $5 each! Here’s how you do it:
[Insert Nuc plan pic here]
This is what they look like when they’re done.
[]
These ones are 5-frame deeps, but you can easily adjust the sizes of the sides and ends and tops to make them for any type or size of nuc you want.
This is a simple five frame nuc design that uses ½” nominal (15/32” actual) plywood and you can make four of them (5-frame deeps) from a single piece of plywood costing about $16. I do not yet know how many you can make in mediums. I’m thinking about doing 6 frame medium nucs just because it gives a little more space for overwintering. I’m not sure yet how successful it can be to overwinter medium nucs but I know that Michael Palmer and others overwinter 4-frame deep nucs in Vermont and 6 medium frames approximately equals 4 deep frames in deep so I’m confident that it can be done.
This is a fantastic opportunity to get started with a minimum amount of investment and with the maximum chance of success due to the capability for rapid increase. With nucs, you’ll need to take a more active management direction because they fill up so fast and can swarm. As a new beekeeper, you’re gonna want to do this anyway. So here’s your opportunity. If your hives are bringing in a goodly amount of nectar and pollen, you’ll probably have to take a frame out of the hive every week to make sure they don’t fill up and swarm too fast. If you have five five-frame nucs, that means every week, you’ll have five frames that you’ll need to do something with. Start a new nuc. Here it is your second or third week of beekeeping and you’re already learning how to increase. Pay attention though, small nucs have a habit of absconding if weather is too hot in the summer and it may be profitable to build little supers to go on your nucs and give the bees some extra space. Or, this might be a good time to start to build or purchase full size boxes which can be used as 8-10 frame nucs themselves.
[10 frame nuc pic]
This is the kind of steep learning curve you can really sink your teeth into. And to keep ahead of the mites you’ll need rapid increase especially if you started with poorer stock. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to at least double your number of hives in your first year. If you do well and have favorable conditions, you might even get up to 20 nucs from five in your first year. If feeding is necessary, it’s a whole lot easier to feed 20 nucs to full than it is fewer bigger hives.
The first winter will be the first real challenge. Many if not all hives will be seeing increased mite loads, some to the point of crashing. This may be a good time to consolidate your five frame nucs into 10 frame nucs. Kill off the poorly performing queen and unite the nucs using one of several methods. You can do a newspaper combine, or you can place both into a neutral box. Bees know within seconds if you place a frame into a hive which is not their own. You’ll know this by watching and listening to them. A neutral hive leaves everybody without the need to defend something. Use it. It may be useful to stack the nucs together in a sheltered spot to give them the best opportunity. Find out what works best.
Make sure you watch this video: http://vimeo.com/23178333 several times to glean the necessary information to succeed in this venture. Victory favors the prepared.
Guideline #4: Be Realistic.
If there’s one thing you must know as a treatment-free beekeeper is that some hives will die. What I’ve tried to do on this page is prepare you for that eventuality. You need to get used to it. You need to plan for it. You need to prepare for it. You need to be able to handle it emotionally. It’s hard to watch a hive die, but that’s how nature works. That’s how natural selection works. That’s how it NEEDS to work. It’s that process that you must rely on to winnow your bees and leave you with the best ones. Having more to winnow gives more chances for success.
Secondly, don’t expect any honey in the first year. Don’t even try. You can scoop a little out with your finger to get a taste and maybe you could pull a frame early in the summer and crush and strain it to whet your appetite, but don’t go buying an extractor. Don’t get ahead of yourself. You need a little experience and to start to get good at it before you can reliably expect any honey. Keep that in mind and be okay with it. If you do the right things at the right time and learn the right things before making the wrong mistakes, you’ll get all the honey you could want. Have patience.
Guideline #5: Don’t freak out.
You’re new at this. Things aren’t going to go well at all points in the process. On my first try, I didn’t get the foundation installed correctly and it was all falling out and causing huge messes. I was reduced to tears. It was a really bad day. Of course, it wasn’t just a handful of hives, it was twenty. But I learned from it. I didn’t do that again. I learned how to put comb into frames like doing a cutout of a feral colony. This is the sort of thing you’ll do too. It’s okay. That’s why I suggest you start with so many hives. It gives you a greater number of chances to succeed (or fail depending on how you look at things.)
If you do have problems, an online forum is a fantastic place to get them figured out. But don’t scream and cry and foam at the mouth (textually speaking). Slow down and ask your question patiently and intelligently. If you follow my advice, hopefully it won’t be all of your hives that are in dire straits. In fact, you might just for fun leave one completely alone for the first year, kind of like a control group in a scientific experiment.
And if things do go seriously south, hopefully you’ve expended a smaller amount of energy and money than you would have had you gone other directions. I really do want you to succeed as a beekeeper, whether it be as a backyard beekeeper, a hobbyist, a sideliner, or a commercial. We all do.
Recapitulation
Guideline #1: Never purchase your bees in the same year as you decide to become a beekeeper.
Guideline #2: Don’t start with just one hive.
Guideline #3: Start with nucs. (This means two things.)
Guideline #4: Be Realistic.
Guideline #5: Don’t freak out.
How to start Beekeeping
This is a sensitive subject for many reasons. We’ve come to a time in beekeeping history when there are perhaps more people trying to start beekeeping and failing than ever before. This leads to a great number of disaffected former once upon a time newbee beekeepers. I don’t want this. I don’t know of any beekeeper or experienced beekeeper who doesn’t think this is a terrible thing. Beekeeping as a career is diminishing. Beekeeping is becoming harder to do and make money. And while I’m not terribly concerned about the maintenance of the commercial beekeeping profession, I am concerned about assuring that new beekeepers have a positive and fulfilling experience. So I’ve given this a lot of thought and I’ve come up with a plan and a philosophy that I haven’t heard from anyone else and I haven’t at the time of this writing told anyone else. I think it can help to make a difference and give the freshman treatment-free beekeeper a leg up on the status quo.
Before you get the bees
Guideline #1: Never purchase your bees in the same year as you decide to become a beekeeper.
What I’ve seen happen is every spring, a whole new crop of beekeepers come in and plop down their $200 for their starter kit with a deep hive body and a medium super and a veil and a smoker and a hive tool and the other little accessories that come along with it. Then they’ll plop down their $100 for their 3 lb. package of bees which due to some natural disaster will not be delivered on time. This throws the newbee into a nervous fit because everything is not working out exactly how they planned. Little do they know that this is the way of things and that they will subsequently receive a whole bunch more of the same. There are so many threads which start on Beesource.com which are something like the following: “Help!!! Something about this is going totally different than I expected!!!” It causes a whole lot of problems for queen and package producers.
So take the time. Take the time to study and prepare. This isn’t like buying a hamster. Bees are sophisticated insects. They shouldn’t need you to survive, and if they had the intellectual aptitude, they would most certainly reject you as their manager. Study. Never stop learning. Open your mind and if all else fails, simply do nothing. You can’t make it much worse by doing nothing. You can certainly make it worse by jumping the gun and doing the wrong thing.
Buy some good beekeeping books and read them cover to cover. I recommend “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Beekeeping” by Dean Stiglitz and Laurie Herboldsheimer and “The Practical Beekeeper” by Michael Bush. Michael’s book is much thicker and more expensive, but at the same time, virtually all of it is available on his website Bush Farms. Spend a lot of time there. You won’t regret it.
Guideline #2: Don’t start with just one hive.
There is simply too much to go wrong to consider this as an option these days. There really is a serious chance that one hive will die in its first winter. If it’s not due to mites, it could be due to related viruses or infections or it could be starvation or it could be a failed late season supersedure or it could be by robbing from neighborhood colonies. There are just so many things that could go wrong that first year. Additionally, having more than one hive gives you many options for helping out your other hives. Call it socialism or Robin Hooding or whatever, but it’s really helpful to be able to pull a frame of open brood out of a neighboring hive and be able to give it to a queenless hive so they can make their own queen. It’s also very helpful to be able to equalize stored honey in the fall when some hives may have more than they need and some may be a bit short.
When I started, I started with 20 packages. But that was back when packages cost $35 apiece whereas now, they may cost $100. That many would only be for the most serious of starting beekeepers as I was. I was intending to become a commercial beekeeper. I didn’t end up doing that, but I did learn a vital lesson. My recommendation is to start with no fewer than five hives. As to how to start them, I’ll deal with that in a minute.
Be serious. Starting with five hives is a serious investment and if you are wanting to be a treatment-free beekeeper, a serious investment is necessary, not only in bees and equipment but in study and planning. At this point in time treatment-free beekeeping WILL NOT WORK by buying bees and putting them in a hive and leaving them in the back yard. Do not be fooled. It is not as easy as that. There’s a reason most of the beekeeping community are still using treatments. Treatments help avoid big and immediate and hard to stomach losses. They are the easy way to do things and they do produce results, for a while. But as it has been shown over the years, eventually the effectiveness of the treatment wears off and then you’re still stuck with the same problem. To succeed in treatment-free beekeeping, much attentiveness and study and work is necessary. But it’s worth it, for you and for the bees, in the long run. Take it seriously.
What bees to get
Guideline #3: Start with nucs. (This means two things.)
Before you can get bees, you need something to put them in. As I mentioned before, newbees commonly jump on the internet or run down to their local beekeeping supply store and grab a beginner’s kit. Don’t do it. You don’t need all this stuff yet, and as far as I can tell, it’s overpriced anyway.
The first problem is, they give you the most expensive equipment, the ‘Select’ grade stuff. You don’t need this. It’s made specifically for people who don’t know any better. You want commercial grade stuff. It’s just as good, not as pretty, but it will be painted anyway. Second, you can’t pick your frame size and often foundation is included so you can’t pick cell size either. I will only ever recommend small cell or natural cell. You don’t need gloves. You don’t want an entrance feeder. You’re not going to want the tiny smoker they’ll give you. You don’t need inner and telescoping covers, you can use migratory or plywood or something simple. They’re not going to give you the kind of veil you want or need. You don’t need a screened bottom board. You don’t need the book they’re gonna give you and you don’t need their video, that’s what YouTube is for in this generation.
Some thinking is required.
The main thing you should decide right at this point is what size frame you’d like to deal with. Many Bee-ginner’s kits include two boxes with two different sizes of frames. However due to a lot of issues I discuss on the Size Considerations page, you should pick a single frame size, and generally speaking, I’d recommend the medium. I have used a single frame size in my entire beekeeping career and have never regretted it. All those frames were deeps and at times I have been disappointed with that choice but never the choice to use one size.
The next decision is what to purchase to start beekeeping. Your choices are in most cases to buy established hives, buy nucleus hives, or buy packages. There’s also the option of catching swarms which I heartily recommend at all stages of beekeeping, but it’s not really reliable as a method on acquiring bees. If you have the opportunity to buy established treatment-free hives pay whatever it takes. However, since that is a near impossibility, my recommendation is to purchase treatment-free nucs. Those are also few and far between, so the next best option is to purchase treatment-free package bees. But those are also hardly available. There are small cell versions of both those and that would be the next best option. If you get in early enough, you should be able to get small cell nucs without too much hassle. I got some from Dixie Bee Supply without too many problems a few years back.
Now for the second part of ‘Start with Nucs.’
Thus far, the things I have recommended are pretty standard. But the next part, I have never heard anyone talk about. I think you should do a year or two keeping only nucleus hives. I think you should increase as much as possible, I think you should overwinter them, and I think you can use them to continue to develop your treatment free operation long after you’ve switched to full size hives.
There’s a number of reasons why I think you should do this. First of all is cost. The cost of five five-frame nucs is significantly less than five hives with lids and bottoms. It gives you an excellent opportunity to make your own nucs and pretty good quality ones for $5 each. That’s right, $5 each! Here’s how you do it:
[Insert Nuc plan pic here]
This is what they look like when they’re done.
[]
These ones are 5-frame deeps, but you can easily adjust the sizes of the sides and ends and tops to make them for any type or size of nuc you want.
This is a simple five frame nuc design that uses ½” nominal (15/32” actual) plywood and you can make four of them (5-frame deeps) from a single piece of plywood costing about $16. I do not yet know how many you can make in mediums. I’m thinking about doing 6 frame medium nucs just because it gives a little more space for overwintering. I’m not sure yet how successful it can be to overwinter medium nucs but I know that Michael Palmer and others overwinter 4-frame deep nucs in Vermont and 6 medium frames approximately equals 4 deep frames in deep so I’m confident that it can be done.
This is a fantastic opportunity to get started with a minimum amount of investment and with the maximum chance of success due to the capability for rapid increase. With nucs, you’ll need to take a more active management direction because they fill up so fast and can swarm. As a new beekeeper, you’re gonna want to do this anyway. So here’s your opportunity. If your hives are bringing in a goodly amount of nectar and pollen, you’ll probably have to take a frame out of the hive every week to make sure they don’t fill up and swarm too fast. If you have five five-frame nucs, that means every week, you’ll have five frames that you’ll need to do something with. Start a new nuc. Here it is your second or third week of beekeeping and you’re already learning how to increase. Pay attention though, small nucs have a habit of absconding if weather is too hot in the summer and it may be profitable to build little supers to go on your nucs and give the bees some extra space. Or, this might be a good time to start to build or purchase full size boxes which can be used as 8-10 frame nucs themselves.
[10 frame nuc pic]
This is the kind of steep learning curve you can really sink your teeth into. And to keep ahead of the mites you’ll need rapid increase especially if you started with poorer stock. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to at least double your number of hives in your first year. If you do well and have favorable conditions, you might even get up to 20 nucs from five in your first year. If feeding is necessary, it’s a whole lot easier to feed 20 nucs to full than it is fewer bigger hives.
The first winter will be the first real challenge. Many if not all hives will be seeing increased mite loads, some to the point of crashing. This may be a good time to consolidate your five frame nucs into 10 frame nucs. Kill off the poorly performing queen and unite the nucs using one of several methods. You can do a newspaper combine, or you can place both into a neutral box. Bees know within seconds if you place a frame into a hive which is not their own. You’ll know this by watching and listening to them. A neutral hive leaves everybody without the need to defend something. Use it. It may be useful to stack the nucs together in a sheltered spot to give them the best opportunity. Find out what works best.
Make sure you watch this video: http://vimeo.com/23178333 several times to glean the necessary information to succeed in this venture. Victory favors the prepared.
Guideline #4: Be Realistic.
If there’s one thing you must know as a treatment-free beekeeper is that some hives will die. What I’ve tried to do on this page is prepare you for that eventuality. You need to get used to it. You need to plan for it. You need to prepare for it. You need to be able to handle it emotionally. It’s hard to watch a hive die, but that’s how nature works. That’s how natural selection works. That’s how it NEEDS to work. It’s that process that you must rely on to winnow your bees and leave you with the best ones. Having more to winnow gives more chances for success.
Secondly, don’t expect any honey in the first year. Don’t even try. You can scoop a little out with your finger to get a taste and maybe you could pull a frame early in the summer and crush and strain it to whet your appetite, but don’t go buying an extractor. Don’t get ahead of yourself. You need a little experience and to start to get good at it before you can reliably expect any honey. Keep that in mind and be okay with it. If you do the right things at the right time and learn the right things before making the wrong mistakes, you’ll get all the honey you could want. Have patience.
Guideline #5: Don’t freak out.
You’re new at this. Things aren’t going to go well at all points in the process. On my first try, I didn’t get the foundation installed correctly and it was all falling out and causing huge messes. I was reduced to tears. It was a really bad day. Of course, it wasn’t just a handful of hives, it was twenty. But I learned from it. I didn’t do that again. I learned how to put comb into frames like doing a cutout of a feral colony. This is the sort of thing you’ll do too. It’s okay. That’s why I suggest you start with so many hives. It gives you a greater number of chances to succeed (or fail depending on how you look at things.)
If you do have problems, an online forum is a fantastic place to get them figured out. But don’t scream and cry and foam at the mouth (textually speaking). Slow down and ask your question patiently and intelligently. If you follow my advice, hopefully it won’t be all of your hives that are in dire straits. In fact, you might just for fun leave one completely alone for the first year, kind of like a control group in a scientific experiment.
And if things do go seriously south, hopefully you’ve expended a smaller amount of energy and money than you would have had you gone other directions. I really do want you to succeed as a beekeeper, whether it be as a backyard beekeeper, a hobbyist, a sideliner, or a commercial. We all do.
Recapitulation
Guideline #1: Never purchase your bees in the same year as you decide to become a beekeeper.
Guideline #2: Don’t start with just one hive.
Guideline #3: Start with nucs. (This means two things.)
Guideline #4: Be Realistic.
Guideline #5: Don’t freak out.