Any Bee Keepers here?
Discussion
I'm a beek. Now is not really the time to start unless you can buy complete, established colonies and someone is willing to act as mentor; many things have to be done correctly by early autumn for them to survive the winter.
I'd recommend joining your local club and enrolling on a course; normally they run weekly theory sessions starting in the autumn then the practical, bee-handling sessions in spring once it's warm enough. You really do need to understand their rather unusual life-cycle to keep them successfully.
Over the winter you can - if you're vaguely practical - buy flatpack hives and frames, and start assembling them.
otherwise you can buy second-hand or ready-assembled. There are lots of different sizes of hive all with pretty-much non-interchangeable parts, so it's worth finding out what's most popular in your area in case you need to borrow anything.
Check the Thorne site for a rough idea of prices.
In late spring you can either buy a "nuc" of bees (nucleus colony) or go on the club's waiting list for a swarm.
I'm happy to answer any questions.
I'd recommend joining your local club and enrolling on a course; normally they run weekly theory sessions starting in the autumn then the practical, bee-handling sessions in spring once it's warm enough. You really do need to understand their rather unusual life-cycle to keep them successfully.
Over the winter you can - if you're vaguely practical - buy flatpack hives and frames, and start assembling them.
otherwise you can buy second-hand or ready-assembled. There are lots of different sizes of hive all with pretty-much non-interchangeable parts, so it's worth finding out what's most popular in your area in case you need to borrow anything.
Check the Thorne site for a rough idea of prices.
In late spring you can either buy a "nuc" of bees (nucleus colony) or go on the club's waiting list for a swarm.
I'm happy to answer any questions.
Edited by Nimby on Monday 12th August 15:20
Edited by Nimby on Monday 12th August 15:20
Go on a bee-keeping course, as I did last year at Marlborough College Summer School. Learned a huge amount about keeping bees, the most import lesson being that I didn't really have a big enough garden for hives. Though I might get away with a half national hive, which I'll try next year.
My wife started keeping bees last year, just got one hive at the moment but we'll probably get around 75lbs of honey from it this year. It's not really a big time commitment, probably about half an hour a week or so most weeks. Our local beekeeping association runs taster days for aspiring beekeepers to let you know what's involved before you commit to a course, I'd definitely recommend doing something like that if you can.
Gaspode said:
Thanks for the advice, I'll definitely go on a course. Mrs Gaspode's Father used to keep bees, and I have a notion I'd like to keep a few hives too. Space isn't a problem, but I think time might well be. I suspect it's something best left until retirement, maybe?
Not really. You really do need to inspect them every 7-10 days from (say) late March to late September, allow 30 minutes per hive.Outside that period you can leave them alone.
Extracting honey takes half a day but you only do that a few times in summer.
We had three hives going into spring this year and lost them all. We thought we'd done something wrong but we weren't the only ones to lose hives. Most beekeepers i know over here in mid-Wales lost 50% of their hives at least. We've started again with a nuc bought from a breeder and so far it's looking good.
Time isn't really an issue once you're up and running. Half an hour or so per hive every 7 or 8 days from spring to September as has already been mentioned should be adequate and we don't touch ours after feeding them in the autumn through to spring the following year - apart from quickly putting a slab of fondant on at Christmas.
We found beginners classes and a good book or two essential but as we keep finding out the bees don't read the text books. Building up a good network of beekeeping friends has helped us out on many occasions. Swarming can be a problem - even if you take all the precautions you can. We've been lucky and caught most of our swarms and ever kept em ourselves or let someone else have them. This works both ways if you want another colony but we've not got a good success rate with swarms from other people.
This will be our fourth summer of beekeeping and hopefully we'll be getting some honey but it's not the end of the world if we don't. Last two years we haven't taken any honey off as there has been so little to make it worthwhile after the bad summers.
So, keeping bees isn't as straightforward as we thought, it is very rewarding helping the bees out, can be costly to get up and running, you may or may not get any honey in return and I know we're always learning. But I'm sure beekeepers in other locations have different experiences but they'll all be useful.
Time isn't really an issue once you're up and running. Half an hour or so per hive every 7 or 8 days from spring to September as has already been mentioned should be adequate and we don't touch ours after feeding them in the autumn through to spring the following year - apart from quickly putting a slab of fondant on at Christmas.
We found beginners classes and a good book or two essential but as we keep finding out the bees don't read the text books. Building up a good network of beekeeping friends has helped us out on many occasions. Swarming can be a problem - even if you take all the precautions you can. We've been lucky and caught most of our swarms and ever kept em ourselves or let someone else have them. This works both ways if you want another colony but we've not got a good success rate with swarms from other people.
This will be our fourth summer of beekeeping and hopefully we'll be getting some honey but it's not the end of the world if we don't. Last two years we haven't taken any honey off as there has been so little to make it worthwhile after the bad summers.
So, keeping bees isn't as straightforward as we thought, it is very rewarding helping the bees out, can be costly to get up and running, you may or may not get any honey in return and I know we're always learning. But I'm sure beekeepers in other locations have different experiences but they'll all be useful.
Yertis said:
The one thing that worries me is what you have to do when they swarm and bugger off, andd you have to go and collect them from up someone's tree with a blanket, cardboard box, and a step ladder.
If they bugger off they bugger off. Disappointing if they do - and in my experience they seem to swram despite our best efforts, but you can't catch them all. You end up with a smaller colony with a new queen, which isn't all bad news. If they swarm again it's probably bad news as your colony might not be big enough and strong enough to survive the winter. 
Shinobi said:
What happens in regards to insurance for bees? Can you get a specific policy or is it more of a general liability policy?
P.s would like to see some hive pictures.
If you join your local club that usually includes membership of the BBKA who provide free third-party indemnity for up to three hives (you can pay extra to cover more). It also pays out replacement costs if a hive infected with certain notifiable diseases has to be destroyed.P.s would like to see some hive pictures.
Our membership fee is something like £20 a year.
Nimby said:
If you join your local club that usually includes membership of the BBKA who provide free third-party indemnity for up to three hives (you can pay extra to cover more). It also pays out replacement costs if a hive infected with certain notifiable diseases has to be destroyed.
Our membership fee is something like £20 a year.
Same here. Our membership fee is something like £20 a year.
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