Beekeeper Beginner - A Few Thoughts - Part 1

Any beginning is a difficult but interesting business.

In fact, when you start a new business, you discover, for yourself, a new world, a mysterious world, magnificent.

Information begins to flow in a stream if you are serious about your future occupation.

Having collected a certain amount of information, you understand that the visible part of the question and reality are, like two, opposite poles of the earth.

This also applies to beekeeping.

I often heard from people who are in no way connected with bees that beekeepers are an elite, it is a lot of money, but none of them spoke of difficulties, a lot of work, beekeepers.

From the outside, everything seems perfect, but when you delve into the essence of the matter, then you understand what you have to face and what you have to sacrifice.

So, if you decide to become a beekeeper, you need to gain initial experience, books, videos in YouTube, you will be greatly helped in this.

You need to ask yourself a lot of questions, and find answers to them.

I think that, question number 1, this is where I will keep my apiary.

The second question, which hive system, should I choose, for convenience in working with bees.

The fact is that, best of all, choose the hive system, the most popular in your country.

Then, you will not have a problem with the purchase of consumables - frames, waxes, additional buildings for the hives, which are called shops. In these stores, honey will be collected for pumping, and in the lower hives, the bees will winter.

The third question is which breed of bees should be chosen.

This issue should be taken seriously.

Different breeds of bees have their own characteristics, which are directly related to their habitat, climate, terrain, and many other factors.

Bees that live in mountainous areas are not suitable for work on the plain, and vice versa.

There are aggressive and calm bees.

Different breeds of bees have different productivity of labor and offspring.

But, in essence, one bee will determine the breed of bees - the queen bee.

If you caught a swarm of wild bees, planted them in your hive, and then planted a purebred, bee uterus on them, then after how many months in your hive all the bees will be of this breed.

An important question is, your time, which you are able to devote to bees.

You will have to check the hives at least once a week, replace and add frames with wax, clean the hive, if necessary, treat the bees from ticks, if necessary, feed them with inverted syrup.

Yes, it would not be bad to find out if you are allergic to bee stings and beekeeping products.

I doubt that, someone dreams of spending a lot of time under a dropper in a hospital, or suffering from other symptoms. But, I would advise, always, to keep on hand, Salbutomol aerosol inhaler and Eufilin tablets, which will relieve lung spasm and edema if an unforeseen situation occurs.

An important issue is the marketing of honey. Sometimes, it's hard to do at a good price.

Your work, I’m sure that you want it, should pay off, and, believe me, the costs will be very large, at the beginning of this path.

In the first part of the article devoted to beginning beekeepers, I summarized the information that I gathered, but soon we will return to the topic of beekeeping.

A few words about honey. Interestingly, when bees collect nectar, they can collect it from poisonous plants.

Below, you can see the plant, which in Moldova is called the Bruise.

This is a very poisonous plant native to Australia. Bees, I actively collect nectar from this honey plant, but, honey, does not become poisonous.

I like to photograph nature, bees and plants, these are my favorite characters of photographs, which, you see.

Photos taken with a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-HX300 camera
I edited a photo in the program Photo-Director, which I also installed on my smartphone.

Author @barski
Ukraine

For my publications, I do not use stock photographs, it is fundamentally important for me to use photographs that I have made with my own hands for publication and I can name them - authorial work.