Technique
3 guides tagged Technique
Explainer
How Much Honey Does One Hive Produce?
The honest answer is a range, not a number: an established, healthy colony in most US regions yields about 30 to 60 pounds of surplus honey in a normal year, a first-year colony usually yields close to none, and the gap between a 20-pound year and an 80-pound year comes down to forage, weather, colony strength, and mites. Here is the whole calculation, jars included.
Read the guide →14 min read
Explainer
Your First-Year Beekeeping Calendar, Month by Month
Beekeeping is a calendar sport: every month has one job that cannot be done in any other month, and the colonies that die in February were usually lost to a task skipped in August. This is the whole first year on one page, December ordering through your first spring-two inspection, on a US temperate baseline with honest adjust-by-region notes for the Gulf South, the northern tier, and the arid West.
Read the guide →22 min read
Explainer
How to Start Beekeeping: The Complete First-Year Plan
Everything between "I think I want bees" and a colony alive next spring: the class to take, the rules to check, the hive to buy, where bees actually come from, what it costs, and the monthly work nobody mentions at the farmers market. Written the way we wish someone had written it for us, with the varroa talk up front instead of buried.
Read the guide →24 min read