Getting started with beekeeping is a truly remarkable feeling—the feeling of contributing and looking after nature’s little pollinating angels. To take good care of your bees and harvest their honey the proper way, you will need some equipment to start with beekeeping.
The basic equipment needed is:
- A beehive
- Frames and Foundation
- Hive Tool
- Smoker
- Bee suite
- Protective Gloves
- Bees
- Uncapper
- Honey Extractor
- Honey Sieve
- Honey refractometer
- Containers
Having the correct equipment is very important. Look at uncapping the capped honey from the full honey frames. Without an uncapping tool, you most certainly will damage the drawn-out comb, and the bees will have to take time and resources to rebuild and fix the comb before they can start to fill it will honey again.
What type of beehive should I get?
There are three main types of beehives you can choose from.
1. The Langstroth
The Langstroth hive has been around for a very long time. It’s the most common hive to use. It’s easily expandable as you can easily add on brood boxes or honey supers. If your space is limited, this is probably the right hive for you. It’s easily accessible and can easily be maintained.
2. Top Bar Hive
The Top Bar Hive is also very popular amongst beekeepers. Bees build out their own comb, and the only downside to this is that the comb is delicate and can easily break as it’s without the frame supports that the Langstroth provides. The Top Bar Hive is a longer shaped hive and more lightweight than the Langstroth.
3. Warre Hive
The Warre Hive is pretty odd if you don’t understand the natural way that bees build their hives in nature. This hive tried to mimic how bees will naturally behave in nature when building their hive in a hollow tree or non-man-made place in nature. When using this type of hive, you will assume that the bees take care of themselves, and you will spend less time inspecting the hive. This is not an easy hive to move.
Why does beekeepers use smoke?
Smoking a bee hive, triggers a bee to go into preparation mode to go gather as much honey as possible as they believe their hive is burning. The honey the now gather will serve help them survive while building anew hive. So while in the preparation mode, bees will ignore the beekeeper and much less likely to sting.
Why is a beekeepers suite white?
The color white is a natural non predator color for bees. Remember bears for instance are black or brown and will most likely trigger the natural instinct to protect and sting. Get yourself the appropriate white beekeepers suite.
What is a honey refractometer?
A honey refractometer is a device that measure the percentage moisture in honey.