Jenn delves into the world of beekeeping with a Detroit-based nonprofit, Detroit Hives that manages multiple beehives across the city. Jenn learns the fundamentals of beehive care, from understanding hive structure to recognizing bee behavior.
Beekeeping’s Growing Interest
Beekeeping as a hobby has been popular for a while. More and more people are appreciating the magic that occurs inside a hive, and the added payoff of a few jars of honey sweetens the deal. And this has been good for bee populations, as they’ve been in a mostly unexplained decline over the past few years. Backyard keepers are helping offset the decline, keeping thousands of pollinators happy and healthy behind their fences.
Pro Tip: Nicole, a beekeeper featured on Ask This Old House, recommends starting with education: “So some of the steps that we took was education. So looking for courses. Finding a beekeeper association in your local area. They have tons of classes, hands-on classes, so you can get your hands on it and learn how to beekeep.”
When the This Old House team installed a hive of their own, they started with roughly 10,000 bees—and within months, that population grew to an estimated 40,000, four times the original number. As the hive grew throughout the summer, they kept adding more boxes to the top to accommodate the expanding colony. It was a vivid reminder of just how quickly a backyard hive can flourish with proper care.
Smoke is a Big Help
A smoker is a big help for beekeepers. These tools look like metal coffee cans with funnels on top, and they allow the beekeeper to softly blow plumes of smoke in and around the hive. The smoke masks the guard bee’s alert pheromones and disorients the bees in the colony, making them a bit more docile and calm.
Beehive Hierarchy
There are a few different types of bees in a colony. Worker bees are all female. They build comb, forage for pollen and nectar, fill the comb inside the hive, and help dehydrate the stored nectar until it can be capped with wax. Drones are all males, and they don’t have stingers. Their job is to mate with a queen bee from another colony. Before winter, they’re expelled from the colony.
The queen’s job is to mate with drone bees from another colony and then start laying eggs on her own. She only lays eggs, so she doesn’t feed or clean herself. This is the job of nurse bees, who also tend to the brood, or young emerging bees.
Pro Tip: Nicole, a beekeeper featured on Ask This Old House, explains that the queen has impressive longevity: “She can live up to possibly three to five years. And her entire life is just laying eggs.”
There are also guard bees, which protect the entrance to the hive. They’re also female, and they emit a strong banana-like scent if the hive is threatened.
Beehive Structure
The most common beehive structure that backyard keepers tend to use is the Langstroth hive, which is essentially a set of top and bottomless boxes stacked on top of each other. In these boxes are frames, which the bees use to store brood, pollen, and honey.
Brood is typically kept in the lower section of the hive, with a separator placed between the top brood box and the lowest honey box, or super. The queen can’t pass through the separator as she’s too large, ensuring that all brood is reared below the honey super.
Each box has several frames inside. The top frames are for honey, while the bottom can be a combination of brood, honey, and pollen. Bees are pretty good at figuring this out on their own, making it fairly easy for beekeepers to harvest honey for themselves while leaving plenty of honey for winter.
Pro Tip: The frames inside each box are made of beeswax and wood and hang inside the hive body just like folders in a filing cabinet, held in place by body pins for stability. The bees build their comb off of the frames’ “rabbit ears”—the protruding tabs that rest on a rabbet cut along the top inside edge of each box. When starting a new hive, it helps to give the colony a head start by including a few drawn-out frames from a healthy existing hive, so the bees don’t have to build all their comb from scratch.
Winter Survival
Winter is a tricky time for bees, as cold air slows them down and causes death. They avoid this in two ways: huddling in a big cluster around the queen and vibrating their wing muscles to create heat, and by using the thermal mass of honey for as long as it remains warm. The clustered ball will move from frame to frame over the course of the winter, allowing them to eat the honey for survival. In order to avoid consuming too many resources over the winter, hives kick drones out in the fall.
Pro Tip: Nicole, a beekeeper featured on Ask This Old House, explains the winter clustering behavior: “Anytime temperatures are 45 degrees and below, those bees will cluster up with the queen sitting in the middle. They’ll vibrate their wing muscles to keep warm.” She notes that bees function as “a superorganism”—they all work together for the greater good of the colony.
How Else Can We Help the Bees?
Bees have been in decline, and while backyard beekeepers are doing their part, there’s more we can do. Some of the changes we can make are growing pollinator gardens with native flowers and using fewer pesticides and chemicals. If you want to learn more about how to help the bees, join your local beekeeper association. Here you’ll find the education, equipment, and mentorship required to start a hive of your own.
