Bees and Beekeeping (and Stamps)

You know ... now that you mention it ... it does look a lot like those mosquito stamps ... especially the bee with outstretched wings in the logo for the congress.

I would have thought that such a large organization of beekeepers could find a good picture for a honey bee ... although I don't know whether they were limited to images that could be engraved.

Nice! I love mead.

I never took up home-brewing, beer or mead ... I have too many all-time-consuming hobbies already. I was a very serious beer geek for many years, and everyone always asked me if I brewed my own beer. I just tasted as many different versions as I could.

I did have a work colleague who was big on brewing mead. I picked up 20 pounds of local honey from the County Fair for him to make into mead. About two years later, he was happy with it and bottled it. Amazing stuff. We were going to make a batch this year from my honey, but my harvest was very low because I was laid up for most of the summer. Next year, hopefully.

What recipe did you use?

Hi zepherusbane,

One of the things that I strongly recommend to anyone who is thinking about keeping bees is to join their nearest beekeeping club. Around here on the East Coast, there is about one club per county or major metropolitan area. Until COVID-19 struck, most clubs were meeting only in-person, but now many are doing their meetings online and you can learn a great deal while sitting at home (sipping mead).

The amount of work required varies, and there are many choices that you can make that will make the amount of work more, or less (usually balancing your time against your money). For example, it is possible to buy woodenware for hives fully assembled, painted, and basically ready to use. You pay a few bucks extra for that. On the other hand if you are into woodworking and you have too much time on your hands, you can find plans for building everything that you will need, and you can plan, buy lumber, measure, cut, assemble, prime, paint and have it all built to your own standards. That's a choice.

New beekeepers tend to spend more time in their hives than experienced beeks. This is partially because it is fascinating to watch what is going on, and to some extent, they want to be thorough and accurate and see what is happening on every frame. I try to teach the beekeepers whom I mentor that when doing an inspection, it is seldom necessary to look in every box and every frame ... if you see signs that the colony is healthy and without problems, close it up and go to the next hive. This is not just to save time ... the more time you spend in the hive, the more you damage the work that the bees do and they have to redo it. Every hive opening is considered to nominally set your bees back about 3 days (with a 6 week life span) so you want to be brief.

Your beekeeping will be more successful if you find a mentor and train with him/her at their hives. I invite my mentees to work my hives with me for as many hours as they can. It is not a "Tom Sawyering" thing. I learn more by answering their questions and guiding their work with my bees. It is also makes for a better learning experience when they see things in my hives and ask questions, instead of getting a panicked phone call or text when they are in their hives by themselves.

There are seasons when you will be busier than others. In Spring, you should plan to allow for at least 2 hours per week per hive that you manage, on average. In Summer, things are slower and the bees are grumpier so you should only need to check them once every 2 or 3 weeks. I guesstimate 3 hours per month per hive. In Fall, we have some work to do to prepare for winter, but it is not as busy and you don't have to inspect so often. I guesstimate 1 hour per week per hive that you manage. In winter there is not much we can do, other than provide emergency food and give them an oxalic acid treatment. Figure 1 hour per month per hive on average. These are all "outdoor / hive time" guesstimates. You probably want to allow a little more time for recordkeeping and reviewing.

Now, once you get into beekeeping, you will find that you are fascinated by these creatures and you'll want to be going to webinars and reading books and articles and looking at stuff online. There is no upper bound on how long you can spend on this, but that is within your control. You also can get into doing community outreach with your club, or start mentoring new beekeepers once you have a couple of successful seasons under your belt. Also, I have not factored in time if you decide to extract and sell or give away your honey, but you won't get honey in your first year.

There are many good resources on beekeeping on the Internet ... there are many more very bad resources. The same is true for videos. If there is a beginning beekeeping class available to you, I highly recommend it. You will recover the time you spend in class and the fees with having a much better chance of being successful (not buying new bees every year because yours died) if you do.

So I have to share this, since it was a collision between my apicultural and philatelic worlds ...

Yesterday I was catching up on the Beekeeping Today Podcast ... which I highly recommend to anybody who is even vaguely interested in beekeeping ... no hives required to listen ... and Kim Flottum was talking about how beekeeping can be expensive and very time consuming and sometimes very frustrating ... and he said something like:

"That is why many beekeepers, after about three years, give up on beekeeping and take up stamp collecting."