More information: http://velacreations.com/bees.html
More photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/velacreations/sets/72157622528453587/
Beekeeping is an ancient DIY art, performed by amateurs and makers for centuries. Anyone can produce natural honey at home. People keep bees in many different kinds of hives, but we will focus on a cheap and simple design, called the Honey Cow.
The Honey Cow is designed to mimic nature as much as possible. Unlike commercial hives, it does not have frames, foundation or excluders. Instead, it just has top bars, allowing the bees to do what they would in a fallen log: build beautiful, natural combs. Because it is less intrusive to the bees, it's easier to make and manage, which makes it a perfect beginners backyard hive.
Once you have a hive, you will want to gather a few extra bits of equipment, like a veil, a smoker, and a bee feeder. With your equipment at hand, you can explore ways to get your bees, from capturing a swarm to buying a package or nucleus from a fellow beekeeper. After your bees have had a full summer to build up honey, you can start reaping the rewards of tending bees: wonderful, home-grown honey.
I encourage everyone interested in beekeeping to join a local bee club. These clubs are filled with wonderful people who love to help get beginners started. Don't be discouraged if folks in your bee club don't have the same type of hive as you. There are as many ways to keep bees as there are beekeepers.
More photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/velacreations/sets/72157622528453587/
Beekeeping is an ancient DIY art, performed by amateurs and makers for centuries. Anyone can produce natural honey at home. People keep bees in many different kinds of hives, but we will focus on a cheap and simple design, called the Honey Cow.
The Honey Cow is designed to mimic nature as much as possible. Unlike commercial hives, it does not have frames, foundation or excluders. Instead, it just has top bars, allowing the bees to do what they would in a fallen log: build beautiful, natural combs. Because it is less intrusive to the bees, it's easier to make and manage, which makes it a perfect beginners backyard hive.
Once you have a hive, you will want to gather a few extra bits of equipment, like a veil, a smoker, and a bee feeder. With your equipment at hand, you can explore ways to get your bees, from capturing a swarm to buying a package or nucleus from a fellow beekeeper. After your bees have had a full summer to build up honey, you can start reaping the rewards of tending bees: wonderful, home-grown honey.
I encourage everyone interested in beekeeping to join a local bee club. These clubs are filled with wonderful people who love to help get beginners started. Don't be discouraged if folks in your bee club don't have the same type of hive as you. There are as many ways to keep bees as there are beekeepers.
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Signing UpStep 1: Materials and Tools
MATERIALS:
55 gallon plastic barrel, preferably food grade (makes two hives)
22 feet of 1”x2” nominal lumber
46 feet of 1½”x1” lumber
2 X 8 foot of 2”x4” nominal lumber
A 3 feet by 4 feet piece of tin
20 - 1½” wood screws
10 - 2” wood screws
8 - ½ “ screws
Bungee Cord or tie wire
45 feet thin moulding OR natural fiber string and beeswax
TOOLS
circular or jig saw
drill
tin snips
tape measure and marker
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http://biobees.com/forum/index.php
Most of your questions can be answered there by lots of folks that have more experience than me.
Does it just come out of the bung hole in the bottom?
Isn't it bound up in discrete capsules of wax.
I would love to keep some urban bees here in Columbus, this may be the idea for me.
Marya
To harvest, you pull out each bar at a time, cut off the comb into a bucket. At that point, you can chop and press the comb to get the honey.
To get started with bees, please check out the information, videos, and kits at http://www.goldstarhoneybees.com/ . You'll learn a lot about how these hives are maintained and what is going on inside. The kits they have are really good for beginners, because they come with equipment and everything you need to get going.
And I have seen people use plywood with a top bar cut to size placed in between or behind the last top bar. Wouldnt something like that keep the queen away from the honey comb? Or would that keep everyone away from everything??
When you cut off the comb, I assume leaving some at the top would give the bees something to rebuild on. ?
Nice instructable! This looks like a great design for a hive, but you seem to have no method of excluding the queen from the honeycombs you are harvesting.
Bee keepers rely on a queen excluder (usually a wire mesh) to stop the large queen accessing some of honeycombs so that only the worker bees can access them and fill them with honey. Without a queen excluder - as with this design - the queen will lay her larve in most or all of the cells, preventing you from harvesting usable honey.
Please don't get me wrong, I think what you've done here is great, and I'd like to try it myself, but how do you overcome this issue?
Most commercial setups use a queen excluder because their hives are quite smaller than this. The queen is restricted to a smaller brood area than she would naturally have.
Allowing the hive plenty of room to make their brood area large, but manageable, allows for the queen to keep the brood concentrated, not throughout the whole hive.
http://beehuman.blogspot.com/2011/03/viewer-mail.html
wish I lived out in the country & had my own place but instead I live in a city apartment. 8=(
I always wanted to raise bees, but just never had the money for it, or I never had the opportunity. I know that getting started is not cheap...getting all the tools, the hives, etc can be expensive.
TY for sharing Sir. it was a great read! 8-D
As someone who knows very little about beekeeping, barrem01's arguments were very distracting.
Don't wear leather or wool around bees; they don't like either one. Don't wear perfume, aftershave or use hair/body products with a lot of scent. Wear wellies you've duct-tapped to your pants; in a pinch, a Tyvek painter's overall and veil ought to keep you going until you get a good suit.
Find a beekeeper to mentor you so you can see what is going on and how to do things. S/he should tell you what tools you should get, how to spot disease or problems, and you can ask lots of questions then.
Queens usually determine the gentleness/aggressiveness of a colony; you can get queens with different temperament by choosing by variety.
Killer bees do not exist.
If you do something really silly and upset any colony then it is possible they could attack you en masse which, if you did not have any protection, could be fatal.
There are some bees that are very aggressive, so called africanised bees, we don't have them in the UK and they are not in all parts of the world. Not sure how bad they are, if they are really bad, I guess you could re-queen or kill the lot of them.
http://www.cracked.com/article_15816_the-5-most-horrifying-bugs-in-world.html
Re-queening is one idea. Praying to my impotent god (who thankfully did not end the world today) might also be a good idea. :p
USDA Info
Map
The reason that was given is that a new hive populaiton MUST HAVE ENOUGH TIME to collect enough nectar and pollen to ESTABLISH an adequuate winter FOOD SUPPLY of honey to CARRY THE HIVE THROUGH THE WINTER, AND the more cold the winter, the larger supply of honey is needed.
We here are in a temporate area just out of the tropical weather patterns, and surely where you are located is too harsh a climate to allow a hive started now to survive.
As the Author said, I STRONGLY suggest that you contact local beekeeping groups for your local information, AND NOT TRY to start a hive now, just before winter. BUT INSTEAD... start now reading, researching, and learning so that when spring comes to your area, you will be completely READY to begin a new hive.
Good luck!
It just really depends on your local conditions.