1) From Mark at Mark’s Bees: If you’re dealing with your bees, and you notice they are extremely testy (even with smoke), the best thing to do is close everything up and leave them alone. An old beekeeper once told me about the “three day rule” which means that you leave the bees alone for three full days before you attempt to work with them again. By that time the bees should have cooled down and be easy to work with. If after three days you still find them testy, there may be another problem. Is the queen there? Is there something else (skunk, bear, ants or some other varmint) that has upset them? Put your investigative skills to work and see what you come up with.
2) From Carrie at fleur-de-bee: Be ready for the June ‘wall’ (when beekeepers find themselves tired after such a busy spring season, and feelings of doubt, defeat, or plain old ‘I just don’t have the energy to care’ start to set in) and reconnect with your inspirations. Talking with other enjoyable beekeepers (not the grumpy poo-pooers – they won’t help you feel inspired!). Find a shaded spot to sit and drink something refreshing and watch the bees come and go. Marvel at what you’ve accomplished and learned so far. Take joy in the bees you notice on blossoms in your neighborhood – that they might be your very own honey bees contributing to pollination of neighbors’ gardens, flowers, and trees.
3) From Chris at Beekeeping in Ontario: Read multiple books. No book recommends that you also read other books, but I found opinions and information to vary drastically between books. New beekeepers can definitely benefit by reading more than one book.
4) From Rita, a new beekeeper this year: Take a full year to fully explore this hobby before taking the plunge. Read everything you can get your hands on (“Confessions of a Bad Beekeeper” should be required reading IMHO), talk to bee people, join a local beekeepers group, join a beekeepers online forum.
5) From James at The Surreybeekeeper: Take some time to pop up to the hive on a lovely warm and bright evening, stand a safe distance away, with a glass of red wine and simply watch the hive. Not only is it lovely to do but you get to see the hive at its best and get to study the bees when they are going about their business. You can learn a lot by just watching them naturally rather than looking through the hive. By understanding them better you will be a better beekeeper (though the red wine is also nice!).
6) Michelle from Within the Hive writes: Remember that bees are livestock and need to be managed as such if living within urban areas. I’m seeing more and more articles coming out about swarms of bees ending up on bicycles, park benches, etc… and I think it will only be a matter of time before it becomes an issue. Unless someone lives in a rural area just letting the bees do what comes natural really isn’t an option (like we thought). If we as city beekeepers don’t’ consider the effect our beekeeping has on our neighbors it won’t be long before beekeeping in urban areas becomes illegal again. It just takes one ornery influential neighbor to turn things sour for a happy beekeeper.
7) Anita over at Beverly Bees says: Find a bee mentor and learn everything you can from that person. There is so much about beekeeping that cannot be learned from a book or in a class. Beekeeping has to be experienced firsthand. Having someone to guide your way will make all the difference in your success as a beekeeper. Seek out other beekeepers in a club or online and talk to them. They are a wealth of knowledge.
8) Ray at Reno Urban Beekeepers writes that: Queens don’t like to travel over sealed honey comb, but in the spring, many beekeepers like to swap the bottom two boxes, the brood chamber and the food chamber, to get the queen (who has made her way up to the top box) back down in the lower box. If you do that, keeping in mind the inch or so of capped honey in that top box, the queen will now be stuck in the bottom box. So use a cappings scratcher to scratch the cappings off the honey comb at the top of the brood frames. Just a few inches in the center of 2 or 3 middle frames is enough to make a chimney for the queen to use to travel up into the 2nd story box. Just breaking the cappings is enough, and the house bees will finish the job of relocating the honey, and the queen will now be able to move about her domain more freely.
9) Sam over at Bee Crazy says: Keep more then one hive, three would be better, since after all death is natural. Having your one and only hive die is much too disheartening, so keep three or more, this also lets you compare them. For instance if I am waiting for a queen to be mated I watch for pollen to go into the new hive, but if there is a pollen dearth, having a couple other hives allows you to compare what they look like so you know that a lack of pollen isn’t just a sign of a lack of brood.
10) Natalie at Knatolee’s World writes: When you get started, every beekeeper will tell you a different way to do the same thing. There are as many opinions as there are beekeepers, as I’m sure you know. So I think it’s really important to learn to trust your gut, especially as time goes on and you become more comfortable working with the girls. Spend a lot of time with your bees and get to know them. They’ll let you know how they are doing if you listen.
