Kamikaze

Good question! A single hive is good enough to maintain, but I, and nearly every beekeeper I've met, recommend at least two hives. That way, you can compare them and see which one is doing better than the other. Then you can get a better idea of what a strong hive and a weaker hive look like. You can also try to figure out ways to strengthen the weaker hive as well. Hope that answered your question! :)

Thank you so much!

Hey! It's been a looong time since I've been on here, and I can't seem to find the site's general rules. Could someone point me to them? Thanks!

Hello! I've been a beekeeper for three years now, and I thought it'd be fun to do an AMA! 

Well, I don't think all of humanity would die off. But honeybees alone pollinate 1/3 of the food we eat and add $15 billion in agricultural value to crops every year, so if they did die off, that wouldn't be great for the economy and more people would become food insecure.

That's interesting because less than 1% of Americans are actually allergic to bee stings. Of course, you would have to factor in Africanized bee attacks, since the sheer number of stings from those can send even someone who is not allergic into anaphylactic shock.

I can't really speak much on the Bee Movie, as I've never seen it.

When people my age find out I'm a beekeeper, they always ask me how the movie compares to a real bee colony. I jokingly call the movie fake news, since the main character is a male worker bee, whereas all worker bees in real life are female. Furthermore, male bees don't have stingers in real life, but Barry B. Benson does. I know it's just a fictional kids movie, but I just think it's funny to point those parts out.

I don't know if I'll ever watch it, because the reaction I get out of people when I tell them I've never seen it (What?! You're a beekeeper and you've never seen the Bee Movie?!) is probably funnier than the movie itself ;)

Nice puns xD.

My favorite part so far is the inspections, where you open up the hive, and make sure that everything is going well. This takes about thirty minutes per hive.

And yes, you do keep some honey. The bees usually make WAY more than they actually need, so the beekeeper tends to take a lot of it.

However, I did not keep any this year, as it was my first. There are many different opinions on pretty much every aspect of beekeeping. Some people say you can take all of the honey off and just feed sugar water, and others say you should leave all of it for the bees during their first winter so they can become fully established going into the colony's second year. I went with the latter option, just to be(e) safe. 

Three times. Twice through the suit, once on bare skin. 

It takes time to figure out exactly how gentle you should be - even if you are gentle, you still might tick them off.

I was about to go out of town for two weeks last June, so I asked my friend to feed the bees while I was gone. I invited him over so that I could show him how (you use sugar water). Now, I have a full bee suit and a half of one that covers the top of the body plus your head. I let him wear the full one, and I wore the half suit, but I wore shorts that day - bad idea! Everything went pretty well at first until I took off the inner cover and set it down on the ground. I had only been keeping bees for a month at this point, so I didn't yet understand that slower movements are the way to go. So when I set the inner cover on the ground, not as gently as I should have, they got MAD. About 5 seconds later, one of them stung me on the shin. When a bee stings you, they release an alarm pheromone that tells other bees to go after you too. You can use a smoker to mask the pheromone, but I was being an idiot and didn't think to light it and bring it out there with me. Not wanting to get stung by more bees, I ran a little bit away, scraped out the stinger, and yelled over to my friend the instructions for how to feed them. 

That wasn't very smart on my part ;)

Hello,

I just finished my first year of beekeeping. I can't wait for the years to come, and I spend a lot of my free time reading and writing about bees.

Ask me anything about bees or beekeeping :)

A honeybee has nearly 3 million hairs on its body.