Bees and Beekeeping - You best be a bee-lover

[Marissa Moira]

You can turn honey into mead, basically bees are insects that make free booze.

 

[heathercho]

I don't have bees, though there is a bee... farm place that has well, bees nearby and the bees visit my yard for the native flowers that come out mid winter. They sell a wild/free range bush honey, so I assume my trees contribute to that one.

I always make sure those trees are ready for bee-ing and aren't stripped by pets I have. I like the idea of having bees, but I don't have time for bees, so it's kinda the next best thing.

@Aumis Graham if you can go to a local farmer's market and find out where local hives are, I don't know if they'd do it where you are, but the local bee farm "rents" out hives to people who want their own hive but like... can't keep it at their place. They'll also maintain hives on your behalf. I don't know if that's a common thing though.

 

[Spelling Bee]

You can turn honey into mead, basically bees are insects that make free booze.

Honey-based drinks are the bee's knees

 

[Picnic_Boy]

I wanna raise bumblebees. Not because I want to harvest their honey or for any smart reason. Just cuz.

 

[Piss Clam]

I let my neighbor use one of my fields for a hive. It was close to a power line so he put out no spraying signs.

I believe he had three hives and after a few years they all died out.

Don't know why.

 

[DatBepisTho]

I really want to get into beekeeping, but I live in town with nosey neighbors/trouble-causing teens and I just know someone would get stung to death fucking with one of my hives; they'd find some way to say it's my fault despite common sense saying you don't mess around with hives unprotected.

 

[adorable bitch]

I always thought bees were fuzzy and cute. Maybe I'm biased because I've never been stung by one.

 

[MerriedxReldnahc]

I would love to raise bees. I have a lot that come by the garden already since I try to plant bee-friendly flowers. They actually love our trees the most, they're myoporum laetum trees so there's lots of tiny white flowers that the bees swarm around. They seem to like me too, I've had bees land on me and just chill there. I had one sit on my hand for 5 minutes while my friends just gawked in amazement. They're not going to sting you unless you start flailing around like a tard.

I've kept bees unintentionally before, we had a whole hive in our outside cable box that ended up leaving. Didn't know where they all went to until a few months later when I went to run the heater for the first time in a few months. I heard weird noises from the closet where the heating unit is, and when I opened it up I released the angry hivemates of the 1000+ bees that got cooked when the heater was running. It was so bad, there were dead bees and honey all over the heating unit and floor. I still don't know how the hell they got in there!

 

[Aumis Graham]

Luddite horseshit entirely, they let you harvest honey with minimal disturbance and no smoke. It's a giant leap in beekeeping tech, and I'm buying hives the second I have somewhere to put them.

I heard that these were sort of a scam. Only read/heard about that once, so I can't say I'm much of an expert. Guess I should do some reading.

@Aumis Graham if you can go to a local farmer's market and find out where local hives are, I don't know if they'd do it where you are, but the local bee farm "rents" out hives to people who want their own hive but like... can't keep it at their place. They'll also maintain hives on your behalf. I don't know if that's a common thing though.

I never have heard about that. Thanks for the tip off, I've got to start looking then!

 

[Kaiser Wilhelm's Ghost]

Yeah what's the deal with that
I remember back in the early 00s when Art Bell would go on about how the bees were all dying forever

It's a type of bee mite, which has been able to actively spread through North American and European populations and causes hive collapse. A lot of bee's are being imported from Australia, where it hasn't reached in order to rebuild sustainable populations. Hive blight is terrible, but it's not impossible to avoid. Having a healthy colony populations, and spreading out over a wide distance is the best predictor of long term success in avoiding colony collapse.

I wanna raise bumblebees. Not because I want to harvest their honey or for any smart reason. Just cuz.

You will want to build a bee hotel to help them out in, and encourage a place for them to winter over. Most of them burrow underground, but will happily use a bee hotel as a staging point for the winter months. It's also used by other pollinators, including some forms of solitary wasps. (they predate insects)



This is a subject close to my heart. I love beehives and honey, and have always wanted to own my own. Even going as far as to trying to domesticate a wild hive once.

Reasons for owning a hive.

a) Honey.
Honey is amazingly good for you. It's a simple sugar, so it's acclimated to the body much easier, it doesn't seem to have the same issues with glycemic indexes that forms of syrup do. It tastes great and can be flavored by the use of local flower selections, and best of all it can carry over the health benefits of certain types of plants, like Manuka which is great for your immune system. Also people who eat local honey, tend to have less issues with hay fever and other pollen related complaints. It's also an antiseptic for wounds.

Honey also has a limitless shelf life it properly sealed.

b) Honey related products.
Meade is one of the easiest wines to make, and it is one of the best to drink. Also honey added to beer mixtures makes for unique and complex flavors. Also honey cream as a spreadable is amazingly delicious. There are also a number of applications of honey for beauty products.

c) Wax can be used to make a lot of different styles of beauty products, it's a very useful pliable wax that makes terrific candles, that help emit ions into the air, which helps reduce air pollution. It also makes for excellent and gentle furniture polish, boot polish, and generally any other application you could use a mid firmness wax for.
(I use it for mustache maintenance.)

d) Propolis.
This stuff essentially as a food supplement, and also as a health product has a myriad of good effects on health and diet, as well as being a natural anti-bacterial and anti-inflammatory. The bee's make it to protect the hive from infectious diseases, so it's really useful as a medicinal.

e) Bee Pollen.
Bee's mix male pollen with their own digestive enzymes to make Bee Pollen. It's essentially a pollen that even the most allergic of people can react with, and helps build up resistance to certain styles of pollens, as well as having an added benefit of being exceptionally healthy for the body and the digestive system.

f) Royal Jelly.
This is the stuff that is meant for the Queen and the future Queens, it's what causes the worker bee larvae to evolve into a potential Queen. As far as people go, it's excellent as a dietary supplement, and also has been shown to have great value in improving healing and cellular damages.

I'm sure I'm missing some things or two, but there is a reason that humans domesticated bee's so early in our history.

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

The "local honey helps with allergies" thing is inconclusive (not debunked however. immune shit is just weird) and there's no good scientific studies that suggest royal jelly is good for anything but rearing queens and tricking hippies into paying a lot of money for meticulously harvested bee vomit. Bees are cool, their dried puke is delicious, and they help us pollinate our crops. But that's about it. It's more than enough.

Honey is actually a decent antiseptic if for some reason you don't have access to anything else. It's extremely hypertonic, quite acidic (3.0~ ph IIRC) and is laced with hydrogen peroxide as well as very small amounts of some uncharacterized proteins that may or may not be antibiotics. You're still probably better off using newer methods of first aid though.

The bees use propolis as a very effective water proof sealant for cracks in the hive. It's highly processed tree sap.In a way it's sort of like a variety of honey that's only good for material properties instead of eating. That's about it.

Pollen is actually a really great source of all kinds of vitamins and minerals if you can get good amounts of it. If you have a hive a pollen trap will collect it for you. The bees typically bring in far more than they actually need to rear their larva (adult bees stick to honey, the larva need the protein). Not a great taste though, so mix it in honey. It will overwhelm it.

Sounds like a risky investment with that bee-killing disease epidemic constantly threatening to wipe out your stock.

Yeah what's the deal with that
I remember back in the early 00s when Art Bell would go on about how the bees were all dying forever

I mad a big effortpost about this in another thread but long story short: colony collapse disorder does not exist. There's no mysterious unidentified bee-eating demon that just pops into people's hives one day. It's almost entirely a media invention. Bees in the wild died from the varroa mite. Commercial pollinating bees abscond because commercial pollination is very rough on them. That's basically it.

Diphenhydramine is safe for dogs and not factoring the weight with one tablet shouldn't cause any real problems IN THIS PARTICULAR CASE, buuuuuuuuuut I still feel the need to mention the following as a public service announcement: Some human meds work just fine on dogs, some surprisingly require much higher doses, most require smaller doses and bunch of common human medication can outright kill them.

NSAIDs in particular, stuff like ibuprofen, is actually basically poisonous to dogs IIRC.

I don't have bees, though there is a bee... farm place

Apiary. The honeybees are all in the genus Apis. A place where you raise bees is called an apiary.

 

[Aumis Graham]

I mad a big effortpost about this in another thread but long story short: colony collapse disorder does not exist. There's no mysterious unidentified bee-eating demon that just pops into people's hives one day. It's almost entirely a media invention. Bees in the wild died from the varroa mite. Commercial pollinating bees abscond because commercial pollination is very rough on them. That's basically it.

Interesting post, you definitely know a lot about bees in general. Could I ask you to post that effort post that you made? It definitely sounds like an interesting read.

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

Interesting post, you definitely know a lot about bees in general. Could I ask you to post that effort post that you made? It definitely sounds like an interesting read.

I would but I can't remember what thread it's in.

Also I recommend the Hive and the Honeybee to anyone interested in the subject. It's a hugely well researched collection of basically everything on bees that's been continually updated since the late 1800's. It's pretty expensive on its own but a lot of beekeeping magazines sell it at a heavy discount.

 

[Aumis Graham]

Also I recommend the Hive and the Honeybee to anyone interested in the subject. It's a hugely well researched collection of basically everything on bees that's been continually updated since the late 1800's. It's pretty expensive on its own but a lot of beekeeping magazines sell it at a heavy discount.

Good rec, I plan on buying it once I can get a cheaper addition.

 

[The best and greatest]

I mad a big effortpost about this in another thread but long story short: colony collapse disorder does not exist. There's no mysterious unidentified bee-eating demon that just pops into people's hives one day. It's almost entirely a media invention. Bees in the wild died from the varroa mite. Commercial pollinating bees abscond because commercial pollination is very rough on them. That's basically it.

My understanding was that "Colony collapse" was a term describing a variety of different environmental factors contributing to the deaths of bee hives, including mites, pesticide use, and commercial pollination allowing for the quick spread of disease among different hives, especially almonds in Cali.

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

My understanding was that "Colony collapse" was a term describing a variety of different environmental factors contributing to the deaths of bee hives, including mites, pesticide use, and commercial pollination allowing for the quick spread of disease among different hives, especially almonds in Cali.

The commercial pollinators don't all die so much as they tend to abscond. (and then die because wild varroa populations they have no defense against). Commercial pollination is extremely stressful to the bees and the poor nutrition of living off a monoculture combined with the stress of being trucked around makes colonies decide to relocate. Pesticide doesn't help there either.

But there's no great mystery to that, despite what the media reports on especially slow news days.

 

[The best and greatest]

The commercial pollinators don't all die so much as they tend to abscond. (and then die because wild varroa populations they have no defense against). Commercial pollination is extremely stressful to the bees and the poor nutrition of living off a monoculture combined with the stress of being trucked around makes colonies decide to relocate. Pesticide doesn't help there either.

But there's no great mystery to that, despite what the media reports on especially slow news days.

Remember when everyone thought cell phone towers were killing the bees?

 

[Sprig of Parsley]

Bees are pretty awesome.

I always thought bees were fuzzy and cute. Maybe I'm biased because I've never been stung by one.

Bumbles are great. If you get stung by a bumble you absolutely deserved it, because bumbles are so chill you can basically hand-feed and pet them (very gently) at times.

 

[Your Weird Fetish]

Remember when everyone thought cell phone towers were killing the bees?

My favorite will always be blaming fructose supplements for bees dying but you didn't tend to see that in the mainstream, just in beekeeping forums. I'm not sure why people have to invent some vague menace when plenty of real problems exist.

 

[The best and greatest]

Bees are pretty awesome.


Bumbles are great. If you get stung by a bumble you absolutely deserved it, because bumbles are so chill you can basically hand-feed and pet them (very gently) at times.

When I was a kid spazzing out in a parking lot I had a big black sucker land right on my nose. We had a quiet, still moment before I decided I had enough of this situation and attempted to pluck it off of my face. It hurt and left a little red spot that you can still faintly see under good lighting.