Honey Bee Farming - Tips And Tricks For Success!

Are you thinking of starting a new business with the minimum investment? If yes, honey bee farming would be great choice for you.

Honey bee farming involves maintenance of honey bee colonies or the manmade artificial hives. Bees put up in apiaries or bee yards, collect food products such as honey, beeswax, bee pollen, and royal jelly.

Areas with lesser pollution and population such as the small urban homes or acres of agricultural lands outside the city are perfect to start up honey bee farming.

Things you would need for starting a Honey Bee Farming Business?

Here’s a list of things that you would need before you set your own honey bee farming business:

Bee farming equipment required to set up a bee yard
Good quality bee guarding equipment to protect yourself
Honey bees from a healthy and established apiary
An artificial hive if you do not want to construct your own
A good location close to flowers and far from places with frequent human movement

After you have set up your hive, you can get to work!

Important honey bee farming facts you must know

The bee population increases rapidly in summers as it is the season of maximum reproduction. Some hives may need supplementary feeding during this time. You can either provide it by mixing sugar syrup and water in equal parts or purchase protein rich pollen supplements from the market.

Extra honey should be extracted regularly to keep the colonies clean and healthy. But, care should be taken so as to leave apt amount in the hives for winters. Bees produce honey only till that start of winter after which they go on a ‘vacation’ and feed on stored supply.

Facts you should know about re-queening

New younger queens lay eggs faster and secrete much more pheromones. These are chemicals that stimulate the workers to forage, discourage swarming and disease outbreak also. So, the queen in any bee hive is the real beekeeper! Unfortunately, queens lose their effectiveness after a year or two at the most.

As a beekeeper your job is to ensure that your bees stay productive. Therefore, you can play your part in the re-queening by either killing old queens removing them from the hive. This of course means that you will have to raise your own queens in a separate hive and insert them into the queen-less colony.

If you do not want to raise your own queens you can always buy them from a reputed bee farmer.

As for the right time, September is usually the best time to introduce a new queen in the hive as it will give the young queen sufficient time to get established before the lazy winter months.

Honey bee farming has beneficial ecological consequences as well. The bees play a very crucial role in pollination of a large variety of flowering plants. This helps to increase the yield of a large number of crops like sunflower and a variety of fruits too! Liked what you have read so far and want to know more?