Beekeeping Mistakes

Many new beekeepers make mistakes and like with any skill, sometimes you make some bad mistakes which cause things to fail. In this post I share my beekeeping mistakes so you can learn from them and hopefully avoid making the same ones.

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Beekeeping Mistakes

There are some things we did right when we first started beekeeping 2 years ago, like ensuring there was plenty of water accessible for the bees.  I use plants in my stock tank pond and we have so many types of bees visiting!  However, there’s plenty we didn’t do right and this post will explain my mistakes and how you can avoid them.

This post first appeared as a podcast and you can listen to the episode right here with my husband as a special guest to share what we learned from our beekeeping mistakes:

Many new beekeepers make mistakes with their new hives and so have we.  We’ve lost 2 hives of bees in the 2 years we have been tending bees.

Yikes.

I considered naming this post “How Not to Keep Bees” because we really have not been very good beekeepers.  I think I’ve cried more over the bees than I have the chickens if I’m honest.  Our beekeeping mistakes have been costly, both financially and costly to the bees since we have accidentally killed 2 hives but that isn’t stopping us from continually trying to be backyard beekeepers.

Our first hive was a weak hive to begin with and how we have a strong, established hive we can look back and see the differences.  We didn’t really think we were doing anything wrong but, you know now we’ve seen other hives we can tell the difference. Let’s break down some of the problems we had with the first hive below.

Related Post: I’m To Blame For A Dead Beehive

Wasps

The bee colony was small and gentle Italian bees.  These ladies rarely stung and were not great at defending the hive from wasps.  Wasps, yellow jackets, wopsies, winged assholes whatever you want to call them, these guys were waltzing in and out of the beehive like they owned it and would dive on returning worker bees like a pack of hyenas attacking until the bee was dead and they could feast. 

Urgh, it wasn’t pretty to watch.

Right before winter set in, the beehive was really struggling to keep the wasps out.

How we fixed this mistake:

This year, we are actively trapping the wasps in multiple places away from the hive.  We’re using honeybee friendly wasp traps which we bait with meat and they work really well.  You can do the same thing to keep the wasps lured away from your hives plus it means you have fewer to fight off your outside dinner.

Insulation

Just like a new baby, we were so cautious with our bees and winterizing them.  The advice we had been given was to insulate really well and we may have gone overboard.  I’m talking straw bales, tarps and tar paper.

We had a warm spell in February 2018 and the bees woke up!  The temperatures then plummeted on a night making it too cold for the workers to get the candy boards I had placed in a honey super on top of the hive (I’ll explain that mistake to you next!).  The bees didn’t get the food and had used all of their stores before Spring arrived.

How we fixed this mistake:

Nearby beehives are only wrapped in tar paper.  This year, we’re doing the same thing for our Langstroth hive, the top bar beehives are currently empty but most of the beekeepers here build their top bar beehives with thick wood to insulate.  You can see what other beekeepers are doing by reaching out to a local beekeeping group.

Feeding

The advice we had been given at a beekeeping class was to keep feeding the bees.  The problem is that if you keep feeding the bees when the nectar flow is on and the plants are in bloom is that it can make lazy bees.  Sugar water also attracts the wasps and even other bees. 

Honey made from sugar syrup isn’t really honey and there is some belief that it is actually bad for the bees, you can read more about if you should be feeding bees in this great post via Beekeeping Like A Girl.

The other feeding beekeeping mistake I made was making candy boards and putting them in the honey super on top.  Well that wasn’t all.  

My husband harvested 2 partial frames of honey from the deep box.  That honey is usually meant for the bees to use in winter.  The honey super was too high up in the hive for the bees to get to when it was cold in the middle of winter.  The bees used everything they had in the deep box and because the candy boards were too far away, they starved to death.

How we fixed this mistake:

Firstly, we are only feeding if absolutely necessary and we use some feeding stimulant made with essential oils; Honey B Healthy to help the hive out overall when we do feed with the sugar water. 

I took the feeding to the next level by providing forage for the bees.  If you were to stop by my neighborhood you would see no flowers in the front yards of by neighbors.  You would see a clipped, chemically treated preened lawn and all the way on the other end of the spectrum a yard where the lawn died and was taken over by weeds before dying again.  There’s plenty of trees nearby but they only flower in Spring.  Summer and Fall don’t have quite as much flowering plants available in my garden or in my neighbors.

I started to sow wildflower seeds in my front yard and added them all around the permaculture food forest.  I even put wildflowers along my fence line until the neighbor across the street put his weed wacker to them.  Now I look to sowing more flowering perennials in the front yard and around the vegetable garden.  My husband kindly agreed to putting in another garden bed in the backyard just for flowers for the bees.  I just about jumped for joy!  Flowers provide a natural source of food for the bees which is far better for their health than sugar water feeders.  The flowers also attract pollinators to your veggie garden to help increase yields.  

I’ll be following the directions for these candy boards this year so they are closer to the bees when they need it most or I’ll use crystallized honey to feed them with if we have any left after our mead making!

Type of Bees

I don’t think we made a mistake in the bees we have kept: Italians and Carniolans. Both of these bee types have been recommended for our area and we have had them from different sources.  Whilst my husband and I toy with ordering a different type or race of bee we remain on the call out list for swarms and will continue to put out bait hives to trap a swarm of bees that have made it through winter.

Research the bee types which do well in your area and visit a local beekeeping group to learn more some local beekeepers recommended the Carniolan bees to us as they are more winter hardy than the Italians.  You can learn about different races or types of bees in this post via PerfectBee.

 

Our Biggest Beekeeping Mistake

I’ll be honest with you, our biggest beekeeping mistake was not getting involved with experienced beekeepers soon enough and I struggle to do that now with my work schedule.  But, I found that there are local beekeeping groups on Facebook and everyone is really helpful to newbie beekeepers.  I also found a great source of information on YouTube and we have a friend who is an experienced beekeeper so we’re able to call him up and ask those stupid questions we didn’t dare ask our local beekeepers.

All of my beekeeping mistakes were preventable had I read more about beekeeping before diving in and I urge you to read and learn before diving in and making a costly mistake.

Offer to help a local beekeeper out and you will gain so much information from the experience.  We are still learning each time we open up the hive but we also invested in some beekeeping books to read whilst I’m on a flight or on my lunch break to learn more about this new addition to out homestead.   Read up as much as you can before diving in and purchasing your hive you will never regret reading up on the next homesteading venture and will be so much more prepared when things do go wrong.

What was your homesteading or beekeeping mistake?

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