Starting beekeeping

Getting started with beekeeping

When you start out beekeeping you are faced with lots of choices about what to purchase – just at the time when you don’t yet know enough to be able to make informed decisions. So here’s a brief guide to what I would recommend. Ask someone else and they will surely give you conflicting advice, such is the nature of beekeeping.

How many hives

Before you start looking at types of hive, you should decide how many hives to start with. The temptation is to start with just one, but I’d suggest two, since that way you can compare and contrast the success of the two colonies, and if one is doing less well than the other, you’ll know it’s not the site to blame. Also, should you lose a queen, you can always borrow a frame of eggs from the other hive to get things going again without having to buy a new queen.

Types of hive

For the UK I’d recommend getting a National hive. The downside is it looks a bit boring, and your friends might mistake it for a compost bin, but the plus side is that most of the other beekeepers you’ll get to know will be running National hives too, so when you trade with them to buy colonies of bees etc, their frames will fit your hives. The alternatives are the WBC hives (they are the pretty-looking ones, but they are expensive, and because they are double-walled, take twice as much effort to manipulate) and Commercial (which are like National in appearance, but bigger and thus heavier)

Hive material

You can get hives made from plastic or wood, and the wooden ones can be pine or cedar. Plastic ones look awful, and can be prone to warping in the heat. Pine ones won’t last long. Cedar is best, will last well, and is the standard material used by the main suppliers. You can treat the outside of the hive with Cuprinol (be sure to get the insect-safe version) if you want to keep the fresh colour, but cedar is a hardwood, and don’t really need any treatment at all.

I have used cheaper pine for supers, but only because I don’t keep them on the hives through the winter, so I figure they won’t need to suffer the worst of the weather. You also end up using a lot of supers – so the cost can multiply.

Hive parts

You can buy kit hives, either ready-assembled, or flat-pack. However if you know what you want, it’s better to order the parts individually, and assemble the hive yourself. I always go for flat-pack, as they aren’t difficult to put together. All part of the fun.

So let’s look at the hive parts, starting at the bottom.

You want the hive to be level, so the easiest trick is to place it on a paving slab. That way it won’t get subsidence from rabbits, moles etc, and won’t sink into the ground.

To keep it off the ground, you need a Hive stand, consisting of four legs attached to a square open frame. I like to go for a variant with sloping legs, as that makes the hive more stable – an issue if you have lots of supers balancing on the top.

On the stand you have a floor. These come in various guises. Standard ones are a simple solid wooden bases, but the best I’ve found is a open-mesh floor. Whilst this might seem to be pointless, they have several advantages: giving ventilation throughout the year (and, if you move a hive, you don’t need to worry about providing extra ventilation when you block up the entrance), but most of all the open metal mesh allows varroa mites to fall through onto the ground – which is too far below for them to jump back up.

Part of the floor design is the entrance hole where the bees go in and out. In the winter you’ll want to attach a mouse-guard, to make the hole smaller, and so prevent mice from making their home in the hive.

Above the floor you have a Brood body. This will contain Deep frames, and is where the queen will live and lay her eggs. For established colonies I use two brood bodies on top of each other: this makes thinks less cramped for them, and so reduces their urge to swarm.

On top of the brood you have a Queen excluder. I use Wire excluders, which are softer on the bees wings – which are easily torn – and is resilient enough to cope with handling as you inspect the hive. Cheaper plastic and punched out metal versions are also available, but don’t work well as they propolise easily and are generally too flimsy.

Above the queen excluder you have your Supers, with will contain Shallow frames. You will need more supers than you expect, as you generally keep adding supers onto the hive during the season as they fill up, and then take them all off at the end to extract the honey. So its probably best to start with two or three per hive, so you always have a couple on hand ready to put on. During the season the suppliers get very busy, and it can be several weeks for orders to arrive – so it’s important to maintain your own reserve stocks.

Next up you place the Crown board (sometimes known as a Clearer board). These should have a couple of rectangular holes in them with Porter escapes, that allow bees to move down, but not up.

On top of that you need a Roof. You can get ‘pretty’ gabled ones, but unless you have the hive in a high profile position where you care about the look (and are trying to make it look more like a hive) then you are best off with a flat roof. Flat ones have two advantages: you can put bricks on top to add stability, and when you are manipulating the hive you can simply put the roof upside down on the ground, and then place the supers etc on top of that – with a gabled roof you won’t have that flat surface.

The flat pack parts all come with little packets of nails – you just need to provide the hammer, and some standard PVA glue.

Frames

The Brood boxes and the Supers both need to be filled with Frames. Generally each box will contain 9 frames, although you can get slightly more honey from a super if, one they’ve drawn out the comb, you reduce this to 8 (as there’s one less bee-space, and they can draw the comb out a bit more on each frame).

There are lots of varieties of frame, and once you’ve got started you won’t want to change. There is a universal coding scheme for frames and frame parts, which are understood by all the suppliers.

For the brood boxes, I use DN4 frames (D=Deep, N=National). These are self-spacing, which means that the vertical side parts are sized to hold the frames the right distance apart from each other. If you don’t get self-spacing ones, you need to insert spacers at the top of them, which is a pain.

For the Supers, I use BS Manley frames. These are also self-spacing (unless you reduce the number per super in which case you have to spread them out by eye). The great thing about the BS Manley frames is that the vertical sides are full width all the way down, so that when you come to extract the honey, you can use them as a guide for your uncapping knife.

Frames come pre-assembled, or flat. I get flat and assemble them. It takes a couple of minutes per frame.

The frames need foundation – the wax sheets with the hexagon pattern moulded into them. This come sin various grades – standard and premium, and its worth getting the premium as the bees will take to it quicker and build a clear pattern as they draw out the comb. You need Deep National foundation for the brood boxes, and Shallow National for the supers. It comes wired or unwired. Always get Wired, as the wires support the weight of the honey, and won’t sag when they get warm , or in the extractor.

However if you want to make ‘sections’ where you supply the honey in sections of comb, be sure to use special foundation which is extra thin, and unwired.

Frames aren’t glued together, but are nailed. They don’t come with nails so you’ll need to get them separately (3/4 inch long) – or if you are doing lots, invest in a nail-gun.

A note about gloves

Bees will sting you through leather gloves if they want to, so better to use thin latex ones so you can feel them. If you don’t’ squash them, they won’t sting you. But when they do sting you, simply pull the latex away from your skin, and that will instantly remove the venom sack – no tweezers required. You should then replace that glove with a new one, as the old glove will be covered in their attack pheromone, and leaving it on could simply get you stung again. By contrast, leather gloves give you a false sense of security, and when they do sting you though them, they don’t let you quickly remove the sting, and they absorb the attack pheromone.

Other stuff

Essentials:

Hive tool
Smoker
Blowtorch (for starting the smoker – don’t mess about with matches)
Bee brush
Beesuit
Latex gloves

Things they’d like you to buy, but you don’t actually need:

Manipulation cloth – just get over the fact that bees will fly around you
Frame rest – simply prop the frame up against the hive
Smoker fuel – use egg boxes etc instead
Thick leather gloves – use disposable latex gloves

Extracting and jarring up

I wouldn’t worry about getting any equipment for this at the beginning – wait until later in the season when you’ll have an idea of how big a crop you will get. In fact, you probably won’t get any crop the first year: what honey they do produce you’ll probably want to give back to the bees to keep them strong over their first winter.

Where it comes from

The two main suppliers I use are Thornes and National Bee Supplies.

Thornes have a nice explanatory catalogue, whereas NBS assume rather more knowledge. However they are both friendly setups that you can phone and get advice – they are quite used to guiding beginners. The hives are a standard size, so you can mix and match parts from different suppliers.

Generally orders are carriage-free above a certain value, but the big exception is for glass jars. In fact most people go to the British Beekeepers Annual Spring Convention, where there is a trade exhibition attended by all the suppliers: if you order your jars in advance you can collect them from their carriage free.