Beekeeping 101

This post shares my own foray into beekeeping, and will direct you to important beekeeping basics – including local + online classes as well as fundamental beekeeping texts.

I’ve always been fascinated by bees, but a bunch of summers ago we started seeing bee carcasses everywhere on our back patio – and many more living and dying bees as well. It must’ve been right around the time that Colony Collapse Disorder was starting to become a well-discussed thing, because we worried that we were seeing evidence of CCD right before our very eyes.   Don’t try correcting me on when CCD actually started either, because I’m relying on my years-ago memory now, and I think that allows me to be a little vague about details.   

Worse still, our middle child – who was just a bit more than a toddler then, and has always been very fearless (hard-headed?) – started picking up and examining the bees, and getting stung. A lot.

  I figured she had an allergy because each sting brought with it swelling, and a redness reaction to the affected finger/toe or even arm/leg. None of the rest of us were stung… because we weren’t handling every live bee we could get our hands on.    This mystery of Why Are There So Many Bees? was finally solved when we discovered that a swarm had taken up residence in our next door neighbor’s owl box. This was very exciting! Here is a pic of the bee removal person who came out to extract/transfer the colony.  

He charged our neighbors for the extraction, and also got a sweet hive out of the deal. Above, you see all the wax comb that the bees constructed from tiny wax plates which come out of their abdomen in little strips like an abdominal Scotch tape dispenser, and manipulated with their forelegs and mandibles into perfect hexagonal comb structures set at just the perfect angle – about 13 degrees – to prevent the honey from dripping out of the honeycomb. Who can stand the genius? I can’t.

Fast-forward to the California wildfires in Santa Rosa and Napa this past October of 2017. I had been scrolling through the usual nonsense on my Facebook newsfeed and happened upon this lovely article by Ariella Daly about her struggle to look after her precious bees during the firestorms.

Ariella is a high-priestess of beekeeping. No really – although largely self-taught (which I love) – she follows the Path of Pollen, or natural and “bee-centric” methods of beekeeping, and is an avowed practitioner of shamanic practices, both in beekeeping and in life. Don’t ask me what that means! Just know that although it sounds very hocus-pocusy, Ariella elaborates that this method “does not teach beekeeping as we know it today, but works with the honey bee as a living symbol, ally and motif.”

Will those beliefs keep her from being stung if she is truly beekeeping in skirts? Don’t ask silly questions and you won’t get stonewalled by me giving you back no answers at all. 

So I don’t know if it was Ariella’s fairly romantic description of beekeeping, her brag about having taught herself much of what she now knows through self-teaching (translation: I can do this?), or simply my own greedy desire for honey… but a little bee buzzed in my mind about the possibility of keeping my own hive.

So I started grabbing every legit bee book that I could get my hands on to see if this was something that I loved enough to really do. I mean beekeeping does have some barriers to entry. Starting with: what even are bees, and how do you “keep” them?

When you find yourself putting down books you would otherwise delve right into because you actually just want to read bee books all the time… you might be a beek. Or failing to engage in family games for bee book reading instead of the other trash you usually shirk family time for.

My next move was to find an actual class on this stuff – like a beekeeping class. Here in San Diego, Hilary Kearney of Girl Next Door Honey has cornered the market on classes. She is an experienced local beekeeper who sells the most delicious honey – honey made of simple bee magic, minus the glop or syrup or mystery that’s in your grocery store bear jars.   She also taught her classes out of her home. 

  This was her classroom. Don’t be fooled by this pic I took during break – it was totally packed in here!  

One advantage she had in hosting classes at her home was not having to rent room space somewhere else for the class, or having to haul course materials around.

Another advantage was that I got to nosily peruse her bookshelves, which I love to do in any house I’m visiting. I know it’s not my business, but whoever painted that landscape is pretty good at painting.

I excitedly posted some of these pics to my Instagram announcing my foray into beekeeping. This prompted an old friend to tell me a horrible tale about his beekeeper friend whose hive recently became Africanized… stinging her 48 times in a single incident, and landing her in the ER.

Details were sketchy about the incident itself (who was this keeper? Was she wearing a bee suit? I will never know), but she had apparently previously re-queened her hive in an effort to maintain nice bees and yet still, the hive became Africanized.

I guess that’s why this topic is a major focus of the class. Keeping bees is not like keeping an aquarium full of fish. Not that I wouldn’t like to do that also!

I was relieved to learn what constitutes a “normal” bee sting reaction vs. an abnormal or “allergic” reaction, as described here by Hilary. In fact, bee stings can be beneficial to one’s health. As one of the most mysterious venoms out there, science has yet to unlock all of its potential.

We learned tons about the practical aspects of beekeeping: Hives. Inspections. Treating for Disease. Beekeepers’ tools. I’ve probably already lost you, if I ever had you this far.

As this is literally Beekeeping 101, it’s the prerequisite to Hive Inspections and additional steps toward becoming a beekeeper, so I’ll leave this here and follow up with the other steps you’ll want to take if you follow the same path.

Thanks for looking and check back for our Beehive Tour post.
 😉 xo