Learning How to Harvest Honey - Lessons in Beekeeping

Have you ever wondered how people learned to be beekeepers? It doesn't seem like the most natural practice to take up, and certainly not a safe one. People first learned to harvest honey from bees by observing the behavior of bears. The bears would sniff out the bees hives in hollowed out logs and other dark places. Since we humans don't have the same sense of smell as bears do, we came up with other ways of gathering honey - including creating an artificial bee hive to collect the honey in.

At first, people didn't understand many of the behaviors of bees, so a lot of effort was wasted on hive designs that didn't work and on methods of gathering honey that failed horribly. With a lot of trial and error we finally came up with several artificial designs that worked very well. A hollowed out log in a secluded area or a clay pot secured in a high area worked very well in the early days. Today most be hives are boxes with wooden frames that contain the honey combs. This design allow for the fasted production of honey while preserving as much of the quality as possible.

So why go through all this trouble to learn how to raise and care for bees? The most obvious reason is to collect their honey, but there is an even better reason to learn to keep bees: pollinating crops. Keeping your bees on a farm near a field is a great way to make sure that your hive has plenty of nectar to feed from and make honey, while at the same time making sure that crops get plenty of pollination, ensuring a good harvest.

Before you get started in the beekeeping business, you need to take a few things into consideration - with the most important being the painful bee sting. When a bee stings you, it releases venom into your blood stream. This can sometimes produce a severe allergic reaction, which can end up hospitalizing you. If you don't know if you are allergic, try and find out before you start up your own beehive.

Another item of concern is the equipment you will need to get started. It is highly recommended that you either purchase a new beehive or build your own. Purchasing an existing hive or even a used, abandoned hive can be dangerous. If the previous tenants had some kind of disease that killed off the hive, you could be passing this on to your bees. One of the worst experiences for a new beekeeper is to loose their hive in a first few weeks and not understand what they did wrong.

Above all you need to know that the practice of beekeeping is not as simple as it may seem from the outside. You need to learn as much as you can about the behavior of bees and the use of your equipment before you get started. Without this knowledge you could be endangering the health of your bees and will most likely spend a large amount of time recovering from some common mistakes. Taking beekeeping lessons from your local beekeeping groups will help ensure your success in the long run.

Chris Shireman is a beekeeping expert. For information on beekeeping lessons, visit http://www.beekeepinginfocenter.com.