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.