As with many endeavors, beekeeping also needs equipment. Beekeeping supplies are used to either house the bees, feed them, protect them, protect the beekeeper and extract the honey. Before you can start with beekeeping, you must have a place to house the bees and at the same time, have provision to be able to extract the later on. Let's first turn our attention to the beehive as we call it.
The hives are simply open ended boxes set on top of each other, with a lid covering the topmost box and a small opening at the very bottom box. The internal structure of this hive is very much like the structure of the nest that bees make. At the very top you have the honey cells, where the honey is stored. Beneath this is what is called the pollen cells, where pollen is stored separately. Below this would be the brood and drone cells where larvae are fed and nursed and lastly is where the queen cells are found. Between the brood cells and the honey cells, there is a mesh wire called a queen excluder that prevents the queen bee from laying eggs in the honey cells.
This type of beehive was first patented by Reverend Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth in 1852.This type of hive had moveable honey cells that you can remove without much trouble and replaced with another.
Before you even start taking care of bees you need a veil, smoker and a suit to protect you from unnecessary bee stings. Now you can order the hive and the new queen bees.
Now that we have the hive, we need the bees. You can buy a prepackaged hive with bees or just the queens with a number of workers and drones and have them shipped or trucked to your hive, preferably trucked, less stress on the bees and therefore, less dead bees.
After you have acclimated the bees to you hive, you need some sort of feeder to be able to feed your bees. There are a lot of ideas that you can implement on your hive to feed the bees but one thing is important: during the winter where there are no flowers, you must feed the bees a special mix of sugar water and a pollen substitute to keep them alive long enough until the spring nectar flows.
Once the bees start producing honey you now need a honey extractor to get at the honey. To be able to get the honey frames you would a need hive tool to open the top cover to get at the frames. Once the honey frame is secured it can be uncapped or the wax caps covering the top of the cells removed and either let the honey flow or use centrifugal extractors to get at the honey. Then it can be bottled and sold.
Once the hive is up and running you need to make sure that the hive does not suffer from fungal or parasitic infections, you need a keen eye and stored fungicides and antibiotics. Do not use insecticides to kill the parasites as it will kill the bees too. Once your bees are in good health, you can prepare for the spring swarming. You need to plan carefully on what you want to do with the new queen bees, how many hives you want and if the environment will support the new colony.
There are other things that you can add to your hive or farm that enhances the productivity of the hive like: propolis or pollen traps, queen rearing supplies, observation hives, protective wraps when winter sets in, it keeps the hive at a constant temperature, protection from anything that may tamper with your hive, uncapping tools, etc.
Ryan Knox is the owner of SecretBeekeepingCourses, a site dedicated to sharing a love for one of the world's more unique hobbies. For more information on and your own hive, check out the site at Everything you need for your very own Happy Healthy Hive!
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