Since this is for beekeeping and I have a bit of knowledge I will share.
Bee's and humans have had a symbiotic relationship since the invention of agriculture, we rely on them for cultivation and fertilization of fruiting crops, 80% of our cultivation is due to bee's and this is where this comes into self sufficiency. If you want to farm crops, fruits, plants of any kind, having bee's is not only extremely beneficial from a self sustaining point of view, but you will also gain honey, wax for cleaners, candles, pollen, and propolis.
All About Bee's.
All eggs have potential to be a worker, a Queen, or a drone. It is essentially what the pupae is fed, and the type of cap put over it, that determines it's sex, and it's destiny in a hive.
A workers first job once she emerges is to cleaning task, then graduates to nursery, then Queen attendance, and wax production. Finally in maturity, she becomes a forager bee. The reason for this is because foraging is the most dangerous of the tasks worker bee's do, they will go out when they are nearer the end of their lifespan, and therefore there loss is less impactful on the hive.
The worker is the the backbone of the hive, she protects the Queen, forages, cleans, produces, feeds, and does literally everything. The Queen's job is to make workers, and drones, the workers job is to keep the Queen and therefore the colony alive, and they become a symbiotic super organism as a result.
The Queen is the only truly individual bee, most keepers will mark her with paint for easy visibility, or clip her wings so she cannot swarm, but whatever choice is made the Queen is responsible for making more bee's she does this by emerging as a Queen, or superceding a former Queen. If a Queen cannot breed, she will be superceded by the workers. (We also can supercede a Queen if needed.) Nearly her entire life is spent producing eggs, outside of her mating rituals, her only job is the maintenance and production of a strong colony.
Drones are male bee's, they cannot sting. They are built for one purpose, and that is to mate with Queen's, a bit of a playboy lifestyle. Queen's will go out on maiden flights to find drones, they prefer inter colony mating as it helps strengthen genetic lines, so the drones of a colony will be around for that purpose. They have no responsibilities, and come the autumn are driven out of the hive because they are useless eaters to freeze to death.
So you want to get into bee's but how do you do it?
Buy the kit. You will need.
One beesuit with a hat.
A smoker.
One pair of washing gloves. (Prevents cross contamination.)
A Hive tool, a little crowbar shaped tool, which will be your best friend.
A bee brush, (wipe the little critters off things gently.)
A Hive set up, I recommend the modern box frames, to maximise access and honey production, but you can use a variety of different things from traditional straw, to giant waterbottles painted black, to some of the new fangled hives.
So your ready for your bees, but where do you get them.
Well two options, my recommendation is regardless of what you are choosing to do you first have a hive system selected for them. The most common modern method is interchangeable frames within a box system. You can stack these as they add to their honey production, remove the frames when honey harvesting.
So your hive boxes are broken into sections, you have your brood chamber which is where the Queen resides and frames which the bees will comb and use as a nursery for producing worker bees (and queen cups, but will discuss later.) Sufficed to say, these will with a good queen contain eggs, little rice shaped pellets almost too small to perceive with the naked eye, (3 days) and larvae, who are like little white rice pellets (up to 9 days) to a capped cell and the emergence of a worker (10 days.) The Queen is usually isolated to this brooding super by use of an excluder, it means she is to big to fit through the grating where as the workers can and attend to the honey supers beneath the brooder and above.
These other supers, are more removable frames dipped in wax for the bee's to comb and store items such as honey which they will cap over once completed, and pollen. These are made out of bee's wax, and the entire hive is sealed with propolis, which is an anti-bacterial.
The bottom super will have an entrance for entry, the top will have a lid, which you will need to weigh down with a brick
In cold climates, you must keep your bee's insulated by adding insulation layers to the outsides of the supers, but with the right conditions, you should be able to have your bee's make it through even the most harshest of winters as long as they are sufficiently supplied with honey and or sugar water/fondant.
So you have your hive ready, now onto options 1.
You purchase your Queen and swarm. This will come with a queen in a queen cage, and a swarm of workers. The Queen captured in the cell, will be placed in the new hive with some existing honey/food provided and be fed by the workers until settled, and then you remove her from the cage and allow her to begin replicating for the hive. Queen's will often come clipped (non flying) or non clipped. Non clipped Queen's can swarm, but with some good hive management that is less likely to happen. Make sure the Queen comes from a reputable line of European Honey Bee's (Italian are really good.) But essential qualities you want is a productive and docile hive. A Queen and her genetics, will play a massive part in that.
Option 2 is going traditional. In the spring in order to replicate, a Queen will lay several eggs, which then get designated as Queen cups, these will be fed a mixture of royal jelly, pollen and honey, in order to metamorphize the egg into a queen. While this is happening, the old Queen will leave with a collection of workers, to a new location, and thus replicates more bee hives. So every spring, this happens without human intervention, or very small hive size. These wild swarms are all over, you can usually advertise on facebook/beekeeping websites, etc. You will want a swarm frame.
The bee's will cluster around the Queen in a ball to protect her, they will be generally docile, so with your bee suit on and a swarm frame ready you will extract the ball and place it in the frame. The bee's will follow the Queens pheremones and march into the hive, and viola free bee's.
Now the downside of this is control factors that you get when purchasing a hive. The Queen is not guaranteed to be a great breeder, there is no lineage of genetics, and therefore you might get more aggressive bee's. But it is free.
So now you have your hive. What now.?
Well rather simple really, you let the bee's do their thing. I recommend checking on them once a week during spring/summer and less so in winter, but these are really just to keep an eye out for problems, check on the Queen, if she is laying eggs, if the pupae are successful, and for any sign of wax moths. Also you want to treat them once a year for varoe mites, at a minimum, this will help prevent such tragedies as colony collapse.
To do this, crack open the lid and stand behind the entrance way, give the bee's a bit of smoke (It subdues them.) and use your tool to remove the frames gently. Do not knock the frames, you should be able to move the frames three dimensionally using your hands to manipulate it to carry out visual inspections. If you have an excess of bee's you can gently but forcefully push the frame downwards to shake the bees off into the lower part of the hive. You want to look for things, record a visual siting of the Queen, number of supers, weigh them, and keep records which will allow you to work out how much honey is being produced.
It is recommended that you have multiple colonies, and depending on how much flowering plants you can provide them with, will determine how big the colonies can become. Bee's will fly up to 5 miles to forage, so that's a lot of ground to cover. Any shortfall will be made up with giving the bee's sugar water concentrate, or pure fondant. (Bee cakes made of sugar.) Though it's recommended you only take enough honey to allow the bee's to over winter eating their own stored honey.
Honey will be produced in a single set. A single set is what is produced from a single hive exclusively. It is much more intense in flavour than that mixed store bought crap everyone is used to. The different local flowers, add flavors to the honey, so abundance of Lilac's will have a Lilac flavor, lemon balm, will give it an intense lemony lime flavor, etc. This is why Manuka honey is so expensive, manuka's are anti-bacterial and they impart that benefit into the honey itself.
Once your ready to harvest, I recommend a centrifuge even a hand driven one because it really is labour saving. You also want to have your supers bee free, so remove them from the bee's the night before and set them aside. You want capped supers. The bee's will make their way back to the hive, and you will then take the empty honey laden supers into the building you intend to do the harvesting from. (If you do this outside, you will have every bee within an eight mile radius visiting you, honey to them is like crack to a hobo.) You want a hot flat knife and remove the caps from the frames and place them in the centrifuge. You will get some wax in, but that's fine, creamy honey literally just has a higher wax concentrate. (I know, but that's literally all that make it look creamier.) Add to the centrifuge, drive it around and whoop honey. You then either empty it into a bucket with a spigot, and individually jar it, (For sale. Honey jars are recommended.) or the sealed container of your choice.
Once you are done, collect the wax because you can melt that down and clean it. To produce wax bars or candles.
Take your centrifuge and leave it out, some will wash it out right away, but I find if you leave it near your hives the bee's will pick it clean making for an easier clean up. You then take your old frames and if they are still in good condition, put them back in, if they are old and dirty, remove them add new wax frames, and use the old ones to make bee's wax.
The Economics of Beekeeping or Why you won't get rich, but it will be useful to self sufficiency.
So the only true way to make money with beekeeping is industrial scale cultivation and pollination, people don't want to pay shit for honey, though it will provide some passive income, here is how to get the most out of your beehives.
Sell the honey, privately or at farmers markets, single set batch honey, they can taste the difference. (Your local fauna will effect the color and flavour, so if you have a specific flower crop in mind and one that fetches a higher price grow that.) Whatever you sell it for is up to you, but single set vs mixed set will always fetch a higher price. You can also look up Honey cream recipes from the 1800's these are amazing if you have a cow and really is a treat. Realistically though, in a bug out situation if you had four hives, you'd never want for sugars/honey in any sort of situation, so the main goal should be to produce for self then sell excess. Honey effectively will last forever, so it's great for storage.
Use the wax effectively, it will not only make the best wood polish on God's earth, but it can also be cast into candles, and these are where the wax truly becomes valueable, since you will be able to make a few different molds with it, bee wax candles are renewable, less pollutant than tallow or petroleum based waxes, and they remove pollution from the air, so useful to you. It's also perfectly edible, but not of any real nutritional value.
Propolis scrapings, put in a pill form these are great for your natural immune system, as is pollen. If you're not allergic to it, that is. Bee honey is also a natural anti-bacterial and can be put on wounds to help seal and prevent infection.
You can also turn honey into mead, so essentially honey wine with enough honey. This is super easy, and if you follow some of the older recipes, can really make superb spiced mead, or hippocras for sale. (This is where you can with the right licenses make a fair bit of money.)
Keeping Bees in a City.
You can keep bee's in a city, if you have a rooftop space for them, a garage roof/loft etc you can keep them. Bee's do well in cities, despite what the mass media reports, they actually are well adapted to foraging anywhere and can thrive in a city, if it's set up for them to do so. Same rules apply, the health of the colony is your most important job.
Dealing with aggressive or infected hives.
Bee's for the most part are good natured, they will recognise you as their beekeeper cause of your smell and once they know you won't harm them will be very unlikely to sting you. (Though it does take a brave soul not to wear a hood, they are just that gentle.) Some bee's however are like your alcoholic aunt, aggressive. This can be through drones, or an aggressive queen, needless to say it can be nipped in the bud quite easily through two options.
First. (Revolucion.)
A Queen is the Queen, but she need not always be. You see workers are intelligent for insects, they know their Queen from her smell and will protect her with their lives. If she dies they will accept a new Queen once it emerges from a Queen cup. We can cheat this. You have an aggressive hive, you can get a queen from a non-aggressive hive, put her in a Queen cage, and in the dark of night steal away the old Queen and kill her. (least brutal method is capturing her in a Queen's cage and putting her in a freezer.) You replace old Queen with new Queen and wait checking in on her. After a week, the old worker will realise this is the new Queen and feed her, and viola out of the cage, she starts laying eggs, and within a few a month of two the old aggressive genetics of the line dies with the aged workers replaced by your new Queens children.
Second. (Full nuclear.)
This is to be avoided, there will hopefully be only a few occasions in your bee keeping career where you will need to kill a hive in full, it is heartbreaking, but sometimes it has to be done. There are two ways to do this, but both rely on a similar method. Take your aggressive hive and seal up the entrances and sides making it water tight, if you want the honey and the wax fill the top with soapy water and seal it for 24 hours. Remove the plug from the entrance, empty it out and viola dead hive with honey intact. (If the hives infected.) Fill it half full with gasoline, seal it, the fumes will do the rest. Then burn the supers, frames, etc. (Bee's will raid and steal honey from other hives if they can, it's a shame to lose that honey but you don't want your other hives getting infected.)
Closing notes.
Bee's are delightful creatures, I know you might not think that when one is buzzing around your head, but the reality of bee stings are basically down to 90% human error, bee's are in part quite harmless, provided they are handled gently. They are fascinating to watch, whether it's interhive activities, such as directional dancing, or fanning. (Bee's twerking.) to the amount of work they put in to keeping the hive a functioning organism and their own gentle nature. Even if you can't own your own hive, it is work looking into volunteering programs, or contacting a beekeeper to see if you can put in some volunteering time. This allows you to learn the basic skills needed and further ideas towards hive management. In the end though, I hope you do get to work with bee's and realise what a relaxing and rewarding thing it is to be the Queen's chief worker, and the reason we domesticated them as early as we did in human history.
If you have any questions, DM me, or post here and I'll try to give as much accurate information as I can.
