The next session talked about equipment. The instructor was a long-time beekeeper and was very straight forward in the equipment he used and why he made the choices he made. He does use a bee suit but he is selective regarding gloves. He didn’t usually use them because they inhibited his mobility and he wanted to disturb the bees as little as possible. He did understand newbies would want to use gloves to limit stings but indicated he only used his leather gloves when dealing with a hot hive which is a hive that is on the edge of a swarm or may have been infiltrated by the aggressive African bees.
In the hive session, the presenter described the purpose of the different sections of the structure, where the queen hangs out with the worker bees and drones. It is important to remember not all of the honey is harvested, a section is left for the bees to use as food for over the winter. I will learn more about the hive in next months session when we will be building hives from scratch. A picture of a 3- section hive is shown below as well as a frame after it has been scraped and the honey removed. The comb in the frame is hard and dry. The presenter said he leaves the comb in the frame because it is easier on the bees since they don’t have to completely rebuild from scratch.
This class is geared toward the urban beekeeping not a commercial producer. In Los Angeles you are allowed to have hives in your backyard within certain space requirements and regulations. I think I got this right that it takes 2 million flowers to produce 1 pound of honey. That’s a large number of flowers and more than most people have on a 5000 square foot lot. One presenter talked about some of the different plants that are good for bees. I was happy to hear rosemary is one of the good ones.
Before I left for the day, I was able to look at the live hive display they had in the gift shop. It was a big glass sided exhibit. It looked like an ant farm on steroids. It was amazing to see hundreds of bees working the hive.
I cannot wait for next month’s workshop to continue on the learning curve. Let me know if you have a question you would like me to ask the facilitators.
