Common Mistakes and Precautions for Beginner Beekeepers

Honey has always been loved by people, and for this reason quite a few farmers keep bees. As the price of honey rises, more and more people are starting to keep bees, so what should beginners pay attention to when keeping bees? A review of common beginner mistakes.

1. Two queens in one hive

Having two queens in one hive is feasible, but it also takes many years of beekeeping experience to pull off. Trying this without understanding many of the bees' habits will only bring the colony down. Questions like how the two queens should be placed, how the two colonies can coexist harmoniously, and how the hive should be set up all require experience accumulated slowly over time. You cannot just see the benefits of two queens in one hive and want to try it; beekeeping is very much a matter in which reaching too high is taboo.

2. Blind expansion

The expansion of a colony is limited by the local nectar sources, and this is where beginners most easily suffer losses. They optimistically estimate the yield of nearby nectar sources and blindly expand the colonies, which ultimately leaves the colonies short of nectar sources, leading to robbing and even fighting between colonies, causing unnecessary losses. Secondly, honey production is limited by nectar sources, not by the colonies; if the nectar sources are large enough and plentiful enough, expansion is justified. If a place has only about 20 jin of nectar sources, one colony can roughly gather all of this nectar in a year, and then if you expand to 4 colonies, when the nectar sources are insufficient, the bees will all leave.

3. Leaving no honey in the hive

The honey harvest season is a happy one, and some beginner beekeepers find that after harvesting there are no bees left in the hive, which is caused by leaving no honey in the hive. When beekeepers collect too much honey, the bees in the hive are left without a food source, and in order to survive they have no choice but to leave. Leaving too little will cause the queen's nutrition to fall short and her egg-laying to be limited, so the colony will deteriorate; the hatching of young bees cannot keep up with the rate at which old bees die, and in the end the colony weakens and takes a very long time to recover. So taking honey also needs to be done in the right amount.

4. Unreasonable number of combs

Beginner beekeepers need to understand one point: the more combs the better is not true, and blindly adding them will cause the temperature in the hive to become unbalanced. In summer it cannot be cooled down, and in winter it cannot be kept warm, which easily triggers disease problems in the colony. Secondly, it very easily leads to wax moths, especially when there are too many combs, and in severe cases it can destroy the entire colony. Combs have no necessary effect on increasing honey production, so beginner beekeepers should not think that more combs mean more bees and therefore high yields; they should pay attention to controlling the number of combs.