10 Things I Would Do Differently When Starting Again

If I started beekeeping again, here are the top 10 things that I would do differently. Number 1 is hive type. Spoken about this before, not going to go into a lot of detail. I'd go with a single box size system, probably go down the Cedar Seconds National route, underfloor entrance, standard flat galvanized roof, poly Ashworth feeder. If you want to know more about this one, I'll link the video in the description where I go into a lot more detail about the hive type that I would use. Number 2 is beekeeping I wish somebody had told me this when I started beekeeping, and I wish I'd poured a little bit of money into it early on in my beekeeping career. What I did is what I expect many people do: spend loads of money on beekeeping equipment, maybe buy a nuc or two, and then realize beekeeping is so, so expensive. So I'm going to go out and I'm going to catch loads of swarms. I'm going to put up bait hives. I'm going to catch loads of bees for free, and then you just start making splits from these swarms. What I have found over the years in our location, it's going to be different throughout the world, but the local swarmy stock is pretty rubbish. Average at best. But when you compare it to some of the bought-in breeder stock that you can get hold of, it's like chalk and cheese. If I'd have put that money in at the beginning, maybe bought a breeder queen or bought some really good F1 stock from known sources and made my splits from them, even down to F2 or F3, they're going to be so better than the local swarmy stock. So if I was to go back and start again, I would invest money in good F1 queens right at the beginning, Make some splits from those. The temperament's much improved. The management of those colonies is much improved as well. And of course, you get a much better honey crop. Number three, we're talking about bee suits here. I wish I'd known this from the beginning, and it is a big jump up from some of the cheaper suits that are available for kind of like thirty, forty, fifty quid to some of the more expensive suits. I wish I'd done that a lot earlier on in my beekeeping career. Since I've moved over to the BB Wear Ultra Suit, my beekeeping has been so much more enjoyable. But it also links back to the kind of stock that you're keeping as well. So if you've got horrible aggressive bees. Coupled with a really cheap, nasty beekeeping suit, it doesn't make for a pleasurable hobby at all. If you've got nice bees and a really well-protected suit, definitely makes beekeeping a lot easier. Number 4, I would clip all of my queens from day 1. When I looked at this at the beginning, I kind of thought, well, I don't need to clip my queens because I'm going to be around to inspect them and get there every 7 days, so there's no need for me to clip my queens. Also, I wasn't sure whether that was going to be detrimental to the queen or the colony. Since then, I struggled with time a little bit, so I moved over to clipping my queens just to extend that inspection period from 7 days out to 10 days as an absolute maximum. And since then, the amount of swarms that I've lost has dramatically reduced. It really is very rare that I'll lose a complete swarm, like a big prime swarm from a colony now. I tend to go to the apiary, and if they have swarmed, they're huddled up underneath the floor. I pop them off into a nuc. Swarm management becomes so much easier when you clip your queens. Number 5 is queen rearing. You hear people say this a lot— try and get into queen rearing as early as you possibly can. And there's no denying it, it is very, very difficult to do. And it links back to number 2 on this list as well about keeping good beekeeping stock. So if you start off with bad stock and then you're just doing walkaway splits, all you're doing is kind of breeding that nasty bee, the swarmy bee. You don't really have a huge amount of control over the expansion of your apiary and your bees. As soon as you learn to start grafting queens or any other queen rearing methods where you can specify the colony that you want to breed from, not only is it really enjoyable, Not only does it save you a lot of money because you don't need to go and buy mated queens, but it also means that you're propagating from your very best colonies, which means that you're going to get more honey, and it means that your bees are going to be closer aligned to whatever you're breeding for. Number 6, this is going to sound like such a strange one, but I wish I hadn't invested so much money early on in extraction equipment. Now, in hindsight, even as I'm saying that, it seems madness because I invested it at the right time. All of that equipment's probably doubled in value now with today's current prices, but I think it drove the wrong behaviors Certainly did for me as well. So when you're buying all of this equipment, you're kind of thinking, well, I've got an automated uncapper now with a capping screw press and a Meller Flow and a 24-frame extractor. I need to make sure that my beekeeping operation is profitable and it can keep up with that honey extraction room. Do you see where I'm coming from? It kind of drives the wrong behaviors, especially for me. So if I was giving advice and I was saying, well, I'm going to start again, what I would do is I would really hone in on exactly what extraction equipment I really need. I had an automated uncapping machine with 50 hives, and I used to make the decision to say, well, you know what, I'm not going to use the automated uncapper today because it's probably going to take me longer to clean it than it is to use it. And I'm thinking, well, why did I bother buying it if I'm not even going to bother using it? Drives the wrong behaviors. If I was starting again, I would still go with exactly the same extractor that I've got— 24-frame radial extractor converts into a 6-frame swing cage— but I would have probably left it at that. I would have bought myself a cheap £20 or £30 uncapping tray, maybe made myself an uncapping tray, and then some way of rendering down the wax cappings. Certainly wouldn't have bought the Mellow Flow straight off the bat. Number 7, I would have joined my beekeeping association, which I did do, but I would have tried to be so much more active within that community. I really do see this as a missed opportunity for me, and I don't speak to the local beekeeping association at all. In fact, I'm not even a member now that I've joined the Bee Farmers Association. But I kind of miss that camaraderie with local people who want to talk about bees. You can learn so much from these people. They've got years and years of experience, and they're only too happy to share it. Number 8 is I would have started using out-taperies before I put bees anywhere near my garden. That was such a big mistake that I made. I would never recommend anybody to put bees in their garden unless there's literally no other alternative, or you've got a very, very big garden. Out-taperies make beekeeping so much more enjoyable, as long as you can get them somewhere that's suitable— good access, good forage, good security, all of the other stuff that you look for when you're identifying an out apiary. But I certainly wouldn't have kept bees in my garden had I been starting over. Number 9, and there is a common theme with a lot of this stuff, which is me penny-pinching and making really bad decisions to try and save money. But number 9 is invest in good quality hive stands. If I had all the money in the world, I'd go all the way with the Abello metal hive stands because they are just fantastic and can go on any terrain whatsoever. They're collapsible, they're easy to move, they really are the best hive stand that you can possibly get. They are quite expensive though, so even setting them off to one side, I would have probably gone with a plastic pallet, and I would have invested in 3 plastic pallets per 2 to 4 hives. I made the really bad mistake— people warned me of the mistake, I didn't take any notice of them whatsoever because I didn't want to spend any money on it. I got myself wooden pallets, I put them one high, the bees went on them, They rotted out within a year, and then I had to spend all of the time getting them back out from the apiaries and taking them off for recycling. It was such an incredible pain. So if I was starting again, I'd cut all of that pain out. I'd invest in good quality hive stands. Number 10, I would focus on learning my trade before trying to turn it into a business. I fell so foul of that, as always, trying to run before I could walk. The easiest thing in the world in beekeeping is making splits. Turning 2 hives into 4 hives into 8 hives into 16 hives is so easy. Anybody can do that. Going through the season with 10 hives and getting to the end of the season and having 10 hives and a bumper honey crop is very, very challenging. I wish I'd learned that early on, and I wish I'd tried to keep the numbers down as opposed to going to this rapid expansion process, because the rapid expansion process you don't actually learn anything from. Anybody could do a walkaway split. Anybody can just add a queen in there and make a split and put the feeders on. You're not at the mercy of the weather, you're not at the mercy of the bees swarming because you've knocked them back so much. It really is the easiest thing in the world to do. Maintaining colony numbers, very, very difficult. It's really good to keep you engaged with your bees, and you learn so much while you're doing it. So if I was doing it again, I'd have probably got up to say 10 or 20 hives, and then I would have said, right, let me stay at 10 or 20 hives for 2 or 3 years learn the trade a little bit more, gain some experience before trying to shoehorn all of that limited experience into a business. So hopefully some of those tips, some of those mistakes that I made will be useful for you. For people who are starting out from scratch, try not to make the same mistakes that I did. I've got another video here showing you my top 10 beekeeping mistakes. There's a little bit of overlap with some of those comments there, but there's some really good fresh ideas in there in terms of mistakes that you shouldn't make.