This is what you want to do, right?
This is where you're headed.
Show of hands. Who wants to do this?
Ya'll are a crazy.
This is of course what they call a bee beard.
This is kind of a gimmick thing. Does anyone know how they do this?
They take a queen bee and they put her in a little wooden cage
and they usually tie it underneath his chin,
and then they'll dump out a bunch of bees from a hive.
And they are attracted to the smell, the odor of that queen bee.
And they land all over you.
And so it looks like you're wearing a beard of bees.
And that's not a way to get a lot of hugs,
but it certainly does impress people.
But, you know, not necessarily for the right reasons.
But if you want to be a beekeeper, you're not alone.
Obviously, there's a lot of people here that want to get started in beekeeping
and I've been teaching this class now for about a dozen years.
We had to take off recently for COVID.
But we've been doing this a long time.
And every year we've got a new crop of beekeepers It's a very popular hobby
and everybody seems to want to get into it.
But it is work.
You know, there's it's like gardening.
It's a labor of love.
It's a lot easier to go to the grocery store and buy a tomato than to grow them.
But that home grown tomato is going to taste a lot better
than anything you can buy at the store this time of year, right.
It's the same with honey.
Once you've tasted your own fresh honey from your own backyard.
You can't go back to that store bought stuff.
So there's a lot easier ways to get honey.
But it's all that work just makes a little bit sweeter.
It is expensive to get started, so don't get sticker shock.
But most of the costs for beekeeping are on the front end.
And if you take care of that equipment, it's going to last you a long time.
If you take care of your bees, they'll stay healthy.
They should last a while to.
There is a fairly steep learning curve, which is why this class is
broken up into three sessions.
Because if I tried to teach it all in one day, we'd all die of exhaustion.
And it does require some commitment.
A lot of people are under the impression that you can just buy a wooden box
and dump a bunch of bugs in it, and then nature takes care of everything else.
It used to be that way, but it's a lot harder now.
It's a lot more challenging to keep bees.
And you're definitely going to have to put a little bit
of time and effort into this.
But the time is now.
This is the perfect time for you guys to be taking this class
and getting started,
because early spring is the best time to start up a brand new beehive.
They are in high demand.
They're also in short supply because coming out of the winter,
a lot of beekeepers have lost colonies that they want to replace
or they may have just lost queen bees,
or they want to buy new queens to put in there.
And so the later it gets in the season, then the harder it is to be able
to even find bees for sale.
I gave you guys a handout.
You should have picked one up outside.
And the back page has a number of places here
locally and other parts of Arkansas where you could get some honey bees.
So we'll talk about that in a little bit.
But a lot of producers sell out in the early spring because there is high demand.
So if you want to to get those bees, then you need to get your name
on a list early usually.
So that means starting in January or so, you want to reserve.
Sometimes you have to put down a deposit.
If you don't, you can still get them.
But they may not arrive until May or sometimes even into June.
And you're going to miss out on the early spring flowers.
They're going to help your bee colonies grow up and really build their population.
Of course, don't forget to get your beehives
and other equipment that we're gonna talk about tonight
so you can get it already, get it paid, and put it all together
so that when your bees do arrive, they're not homeless.
You've got a place to put them.
Beekeeping in these
nice little white boxes you sometimes see on the side of a road or on a farm.
This is relatively new in our relationship with the honey bees.
We've been using this type of hive for about 150 years or so, but we have
been keeping bees for thousands of years in lots of different ways.
You know, back when people lived in caves and they club their dinner over the head
with a big stick, honey bees were already organized in a very complex society.
They looked out for each other
they would hunt and gather all of their own resources.
At some point, somebody saw something like this
and said, I'm going to stick my hand in there.
And I'm going to eat whatever I find.
No telling what they were thinking, but I guess I'm glad
that they did because, of course, that started our wonderful association
with the Honey Bee.
Somebody found that honey was delicious stuff.
There are still places in the world where people do hunt wild beehives and
and they chop open trees and they take the honey out that way.
But there are much easier ways to do it.
We have cave paintings and rock art and things like that all over the world,
depicting different ways where where people are collecting honey.
This one over here on the left
side is supposed to be over 6000 years old.
This is from a cave in Spain.
It's supposed to show someone gathering honey on the side of a cliff
surrounded by honey bees.
This guy is in Nepal.
He's still doing this same method today.
He's dangling over the side of a cliff.
No bee suit, no smoke, trying to knock a honeycomb
off the rock into a basket while hanging on to a homemade ladder.
There's easier ways to do this.
The Egyptians were probably the first people that really figured out
how to do it.
They noticed that if they left a piece of pottery outside or a basket or
something like that, that a swarm of bees would naturally nest inside of it.
If they couldn't find a hollow tree, they'd look for some other kind of cavity.
And so they created beehives that were kind of long,
cylindrical terracotta pipes, or sometimes they would use hollow logs.
And the ancient Egyptian ruins
have lots of illustrations of farming and everyday life.
And there's a lot of scenes that depict beekeeping.
And they knew what time of year they could go in and they could blow
smoke in there and drive the bees out
and cut out all those honeycombs and harvest the honey.
So they were the first ones to really kind of figure that out.
And in the Middle East
and in different places, a lot of them still use the same type of beehive today.
All the ancient peoples
kept bees in some way or other or took advantage of them.
And so you see honeybees depicted in lots of different art and jewelry
and on coins They knew a fair amount about beekeeping and honey bees.
Aristotle actually wrote a whole treatise on beekeeping, but
he had a lot of strange ideas as well that of course, we realized now are wrong.
One of the things that ancient people believed was that if you bury
an ox in the ground up to its neck, a dead ox,
I don't think you'd do it to a live one, then a swarm of bees would issue from it.
Well,
if you leave a dead cow laying around, you are going to get a lot of insects,
but you're not going to get a lot of honey from them.
But for some reason, that got written down and people believed it for a long time.
Another piece of ancient lore was the idea that if you do see a swarm of bees,
you take out your big metal kitchen pan and a big metal spoon,
and you bang them together and it will call the bee swarm down,
and they'll land somewhere where you can collect them.
And a lot of people actually believe this until quite recently.
And some of y'all may have heard of this from your your grandparents.
People would practice this.
It was called tanging And so it's depicted in a lot of illustrations
in ancient beekeeping literature.
The truth is, it doesn't really matter if you're banging on your pots and pans.
Honey bees don't travel very far before they
when they leave their hive, before they settle down anyway.
And we'll talk about that swarming behavior later.
But if you run out into the street and bang your kitchenware
together, essentially what you've done is call attention to it.
And you've called dibs on that swarm that you saw because you couldn't just
call on the phone
with your credit card and order bees to be sent to you in the mail back then.
And the only way to get more bees usually was to capture a swarm.
So that was a good way to do it.
What people did know about bees is that they needed shelter.
Honeybees like to live in hollow trees or some other cavity
and so we can provide them with some kind of shelter
and we can make them reasonably happy and they can produce honey for us.
We know that bees visit flowers because that's where you see them all.
And we know that bees need fresh water because you also see them,
especially in hot weather down by the creek,
lapping up a little bit of water and taking it home with them.
And of course, it's a good idea to keep the honeybees away from livestock
or actually to keep your livestock away from honeybees.
Cows aren't very smart if they're in the same pasture with beehives.
Sometimes they'll rub up against them
and just knock them over and not realize why they're being stung.
Horses also get stung, but they're a little smarter and they hold a grudge.
Several people have told me that their horses
have kicked over their beehives when they got stung.
And when you set the hives back up, you leave them in the same pasture
the horses come back and
kick them over again because they remember that those beehives were so mean.
So you want to make sure that you keep them out of the way.
If you've got chickens or other poultry, you can actually keep them
in the same yard with honeybees.
And they do very well together.
But your hens will actually eat some of the other insects
that like to get into beehives.
We talk about that later on in our lesson.
So people
didn't necessarily know a whole lot about beekeeping
or about honeybee biology and things, but they knew enough to get by.
In Europe, honeybees were just another wild species.
And if you just left one of these straw baskets upside down, then
bees would naturally nest inside of it.
Sometimes they would keep bees in the trees.
You'd find a wild bees nest.
It was not uncommon in some places to just chop open the tree, remove
some of the honeycombs, or all of them, depending on what you wanted to do.
And you might even
take a plank of wood and tie it back shot if you didn't take all the honey.
The bees survive. You can come back next year.
You just mark that tree and you know where it is.
You can come and get a little bit more.
Or if trees fell down, you could take a whole section.
You could chop them down, drag it back to the farm,
and you could keep the bees inside of those.
It was common to carve them into the different fanciful shapes as well.
This gentleman is in Russia.
He's showing off a tree with a mark that his grandfather made.
And so he and his son are still keeping bees in the same tree.
They go through the forest.
They know where all the trees are and exactly what time of year.
And he can climb up there and take a couple of honeycombs from each one.
And it's plenty for him. And his family.
So that's some sustainable beekeeping there.
For much of
Europe, this was the classic beehive we call a skep,
it's a straw basket turned upside down.
And oftentimes they might have put a little hole in it
or simply put a rock under one corner and prop it up.
And the bees can go up underneath it.
A lot easier to carry these around than hollow logs or terracotta pots.
So this became a very popular way to keep bees in a lot of places.
They often kept bees up on castle walls so the bees could fly out into
the countryside and gather nectar and make honey.
And if forced, if your castle is under siege by some invaders,
you can simply push the hives off and drop them on people's heads.
So they were used as defense very often as well.
Skeps were
basically just straw baskets turned upside down, like I said.
But they would often weave
some sticks into it and it provided a little bit of support.
When the bees started to make their honeycomb.
But basket making was a common skill.
And so these were very easy to make.
And at the end of the year, you would just come along.
The end of the summer, you'd pick one up if it was nice and heavy
then you could harvest the honey from it by holding it over
a sulfur fire and killing all the bees.
So you punish the bees that did all the hard work by killing them.
If it was kind of light.
Those bees were lazy.
They didn't do much, weren't very productive.
Then you'd let them last another year.
But there always seem to be plenty of bees,
so they would just put the empty skeps out again next year and more swarms would
move in.
Now, when people came over here to the New World,
the colonists brought lots of their favorite plants and animals with them.
There were no honey bees in North and South America.
They're not native to this side of the world.
And so they brought them from Europe.
And the honeybees thought it was great over here.
There was lots of old growth forests on the East Coast, lots of hollow trees,
plenty of wildflowers.
And there wasn't a lot of competition from the native bees.
There are lots of bees that are native, there's about 4000 species of bees
native to North America.
We've got over
200 or 300 here just in Arkansas, but they didn't live in large colonies.
They didn't make lots of honey like the honey bees.
So the honey bees, of course, became very popular.
And we didn't have a lot of straw over here.
We didn't have vast fields of grain like they did in Europe, where they had
cut down a lot of forest, but we had plenty of wood.
And so we started keeping bees in box hives like this
or in hollow log hives here in the new world.
And so this was very common until fairly recently in a lot of places.
But no matter where the bees are, no matter what
they're living inside of, they tend to behave in the same way.
And they like to build their honeycombs parallel to each other
with a little bit of space in between.
Starting in the top of a cavity and working down.
So the longer they live in there,
then the longer those honeycombs become so inside of a hollow tree.
Sometimes it may not be a space that's very big around, but the honeycombs
could be six, seven, eight feet tall all up inside of that hollow tree.
Sometimes they
show up in surprising places where we don't expect them.
So it's very important
if you're an urban beekeeper, to be conscientious of your neighbors,
do your best to manage and control for swarms so that they don't get out
and try to move into your neighbors
structures or other strange places.
But you know, we kept bees for thousands of years
before somebody realized that, hey wait a minute.
These combs are always about the same thickness.
They're about an inch thick, and they always leave
a little bit of space in between them, no matter where they build them.
And so this became a revolutionary concept when it was really understood.
We call this the bee space.
And it's probably the most important concept for you as a beekeeper.
So if you're taking notes,
write that down, underline it, put some little stars around it
and circle it a couple of times.
That concept makes everything work.
And when we violate the bee space, it makes everything go wrong.
And I'll come back to that concept again and again as we're working.
But it's not one exact measurement.
It's kind of a range between about a quarter
inch and three eighths of an inch.
But generally we consider three eighths of an inch to be the bee space.
It's enough room for two honeybees to work back to back on different honeycombs
and not get in each other's way, but be able to move freely around.
Any space inside of a
hive that is larger than three eighths of an inch.
The honey bees are going to build comb in there.
So if you have any gaps, any spaces, the bees are going to utilize that
by constructing honeycomb either to store food
or to make cells that the queen can use to lay eggs.
So that's what they store in these spaces.
If there's any space smaller and this is what happens
if you have too much space, they build combs in weird places.
So if you leave an extra amount of space in there, then it causes problems.
Any space that's smaller than a quarter of an inch.
Honey bees don't like, they can't use it, and it's a place
for other species of insects and pests to get in to hide and cause mischief.
And so they seal it off.
Bees go out and they gather this material called propolis or propolis.
It's a resin that they collect from trees and they kind of use it like caulking.
They seal up cracks and crevices in the hive.
So when we stack two beehive boxes together, they always seal up
any gaps in between there.
With this propolis, it's really sticky and gooey.
And we sometimes you hear it called bee glue, and sometimes
it can stick the hive together so hard it's almost impossible to open them up.
It will get on everything you own as a beekeeper if you're not careful.
In fact, I was out at my hives this weekend and I took a picture
of something, and later I discovered that I had propolis all over my cell phone.
So you got to be careful with that.
But it gets on your clothes, it gets on your gloves,
on your tools and everything else, and it's really hard to get off.
Bees also coat everything inside the hive with a paper thin layer of this propolis
and they smear it around anything that shouldn't move,
but does the bees seal it in place any space in their
that's smaller than a quarter inch, The bees just fill it in.
And if we design and build our hives in the right way,
we keep that gap to just the right amount.
Then the bees don't fill it in.
They use it to travel between parts of the hive.
They don't build comb there and they don't fill it with propolis
And so this bee space, proper use of the bee space, is
what makes everything work in our modern beehives.
It's the
basis for what we call the movable frame hive.
It is against the law to keep honey bees in
any type of hive that you can't remove.
And inspect the honeycombs.
So no more straw skeps no more log hives.
You have to be able to take those combs out
and be able to inspect and see what the bees are doing.
That doesn't mean you're breaking the law if you have a bee tree on your property,
but you're not allowed to maintain bees for honey and things like that
if you can't have access to those frames.
But this allows us to take one honeycomb out, inspect it,
look at it, see what the bees are doing, assess them for health,
make sure that the bees have enough room to produce
more honey and things like that.
We can look and see if the honey is ready to harvest
we'll cover all of this in more detail later.
But we can do this without having to destroy everything the bees have made.
In the old days, you couldn't do that once you got into a bee hive.
You tore everything up and the bees had to rebuild it all from scratch.
So we can rearrange the cones.
You can put them in different parts of the hive.
You can raise them, you can lower them.
You can encourage the bees
to work in different parts of the hive without disturbing them all.
And when bees get disturbed, of course, they get a little frustrated with us.
And so that's when you might get stung.
But think about it from their point of view.
If somebody took the roof off of your house
and started moving all your stuff around, you might get a little irritated
with that as well, especially some really huge giant.
So from the bees point of view, we are invaders.
We are disturbing them, and they're going to treat us as such.