We made it. Sixteen posts. One book. A lot of bees.
This is the final installment in our series covering Backyard Farming: Keeping Honey Bees by Kim Pezza (ISBN: 978-1-57826-453-7, Hatherleigh Press, 2013). If you have been following along from the series intro, thank you for sticking with it.
We have spent most of this series talking about the serious side of beekeeping. Hive management, diseases, seasonal care, colony collapse. All important stuff. But bees are also just genuinely fascinating and honey is genuinely delicious.
If you have been following this series, you know bees are incredible. They build complex societies, produce honey, pollinate a huge chunk of our food supply, and generally keep things running. So what happens when they just vanish?
Let’s talk about the part of beekeeping that scares most people. Getting stung.
Chapter 12 of Backyard Farming: Keeping Honey Bees by Kim Pezza (ISBN: 978-1-57826-453-7) covers bee stings, honey allergies, and a centuries-old practice called apitherapy. There is a lot more going on here than just “ouch.”
Beekeeping is not a set-it-and-forget-it hobby. What your bees need in January is completely different from what they need in July. Chapter 11 of Backyard Farming: Keeping Honey Bees by Kim Pezza walks through the entire year, season by season, so you know what to expect and when.
This is the chapter nobody wants to read but everybody needs to. Your bees have enemies. A lot of them.
You have harvested your honey. You have some beeswax. Now what do you actually do with all of it?
Chapter 9 of Backyard Farming: Keeping Honey Bees by Kim Pezza covers the uses of honey, how to store it properly, the deal with royal jelly, and what you can make with beeswax. Turns out, the stuff coming out of your hive is useful in ways that go way beyond toast toppings.
Bees have been making honey for about 150 million years. Let that number sit for a moment. They were doing this long before humans showed up and decided to take some for ourselves.
This is the chapter that puts everything into perspective. We have talked about bee biology, hive setup, and equipment. But Chapter 7 of Backyard Farming: Keeping Honey Bees by Kim Pezza (ISBN: 978-1-57826-453-7) answers the bigger question: why do honeybees actually matter?
You have the gear. Now you need a home for your bees.
Chapter 6 of Backyard Farming: Keeping Honey Bees by Kim Pezza (ISBN: 978-1-57826-453-7) covers hive types, setup, and how to actually get bees into the thing. There is more variety here than most people realize.
Before you get your first bees, you need stuff. Not a ton of stuff, but the right stuff.
Chapter 5 of Backyard Farming: Keeping Honey Bees by Kim Pezza (ISBN: 978-1-57826-453-7) walks through the basic equipment every beekeeper needs. And it is less than you probably expect.
Let’s talk about the question everyone asks before getting into beekeeping. Is it hard?
Chapter 4 of Backyard Farming: Keeping Honey Bees by Kim Pezza (ISBN: 978-1-57826-453-7) tackles this head on. And the short answer is: no, not really. At least not compared to other livestock.
A honeybee colony is basically a tiny civilization with a strict class system. There are 50,000 to 60,000 bees in a healthy hive, and about 99% of them are female. The males are there for exactly one reason, and it does not end well for them.
There are over 20,000 species of bees on this planet. Twenty thousand. But only 7 of them are honeybees. So what makes those 7 so special?
Before we get into the practical stuff about keeping bees, let’s take a step back. Way back. Like, 60 million years back.
So you want to keep bees. Maybe you have a backyard. Maybe you have a rooftop. Maybe you just really like honey. Whatever brought you here, this series is for you.