Comments on: My first Year Keeping Bees

By: A Beginners Guide to Essential BeeKeeping Equipment | Cookeville BeeKeepers

A Beginners Guide to Essential BeeKeeping Equipment | Cookeville BeeKeepers — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 15:57:23 +0000

[...] These are just our suggestions – by all means feel free to exercise your own judgment and get whatever you want, but this will serve you well for your first year of beekeeping. [...]

By: Vicki

Vicki — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:12:29 +0000

Love the article. I have been keeping a few hives for sometime now. I am wanting to know where the hives came from in your article and if they are yours and if plans are available for them (wood) or directions somewhere to build?
Thanks

By: Michelle Erbach

Michelle Erbach — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 16:11:29 +0000

I came across your blog when I was searching for pictures of bee gardens. I LOVE that you have different hives and how they are set up, the colors and the embellishments, so pretty.

Where on earth did you find that hive on the left? Those are antiques! I would love to find one, please let me know if someone is making those.

Thanks
Michelle

By: David LaFerney

David LaFerney — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 20:09:10 +0000

I know that you are correct – some honey bees are gentle and some are quite hostile – I hope that I conveyed in the article that these particular bees are gentle. I do suspect that most commercial Italians will be similar though.

I’m planning to order some Carniolan queens for a couple of splits, and I also plan to rear a few queens in the future. One of my hives already has a home grown queen in it – I removed those bees from a concrete block wall – another story.

Thanks for the informative comment.

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 03:55:53 +0000

I’m glad you decided to keep bees, the benefits are many, from increased resistance to allergies *(due to being exposed to microscopic amounts of the irritants in the honey) to increased garden vigor and fruit production.

There are a couple of things worth mentioning. The personalities of hives do vary. If you don’t plan to requeen with Italian blondes or similar, the personality of the hive may change over time. Not that this is entirely bad. It happens due to the hive requeening itself as the first queen ages. The new queen will sometimes mate with a non-domestic drone and introduce other genetic characteristics.

The bees you have mentioned are on one end of the spectrum of behavior. There are bees who behave more like the stereotypical image. It only takes a couple of stories about these to start a lot of bad press for the bees. However, it should be mentioned that the closer one gets to that other end of the spectrum the greater safety precautions need to be taken.

My father kept bees the whole time I was growing up, and there were certain hives where you had to use smoke no matter what. I think the most we ever had was 25 hives, and out of that 25 only 2 of them were ill natured. Most hives you didn’t need any protection at all except for your hands in case you accidentally crushed a bee. Occasionally we would get a hive which seemed to be a little more ill tempered. After you learned which ones were that way you knew to treat them with a little extra caution.

One last thing, unlike most other bees, honey bees die in the act of stinging. Something that we noticed over years of having bees is that bees can seem to sense when an animal (including the human animal) are sensitive to their sting. A person who is allergic to bee stings will get stung while doing something around a hive that the bees feel is a little threatening while a person who is not allergic will be left alone until they are really agitating the bees. This is an impression of bee behavior from almost 30 years of working and living around them. So if a person or anyone in a person’s family is allergic, something that results in 0 stings for a non-allergic person may result in a sting for an allergic person. Keep it in mind.

Great stuff, keep up the good work!

Fuzzy