Blog

What Are Basic Beekeeping Tools and Their Uses

We were surprised when we added the beekeeping tools to our first order of supplies. It seemed as though the list for beekeeping equipment goes on and on, and we are still adding items. The list for beekeeping tools is very short.

What are the basic beekeeping tools? After getting the necessary equipment of hives and protective clothing, the only beekeeping tools you really need are a hive tool and a smoker. You can add some other items, but they are not essential.

Read on to find about each tool, how it’s used, and what other items you may want to add.

What Basic Beekeeping Tools Do I Need?

The two tools that you really need are the hive tool and the smoker. There are other handy items you can add to the list, but they aren’t essential for working your hives.

The Hive Tool

I love a good hive tool. It makes checking a beehive possible.

The hive tool is a thin flat metal bar that is used as a multi-purpose tool in and around the hive. They are generally made of stainless or tempered steel and come in a variety of sizes and shapes. The shape and material makes them easy to clean, which is a good thing because they will get propolis all over them. And they are easy to sterilize, which is a help if you are dealing with an infected hive.

They are relatively inexpensive, compared to other hive equipment, and we use them all the time, so we have several of two different designs.

The standard hive tool is flat with one sharp beveled end for prying and scraping and the other end is bent over in a broad hook. Usually hive tools are painted yellow, red, or pink, making them easy to find after setting them down somewhere. We prefer the kind that has the beveled end unpainted because it is thinner and sharper.
The other hive tool is sometimes called a frame lifter and scraper. The end with the scraper is square and beveled on two sides. The other end is in a flat J shape.

The hive tool is used to pry hive boxes apart after your bees have glued them together with propolis. We use it to get under the end or the middle edge of frames to pry them up so we can pick the frames up for examination. We scrape propolis off frames and boxes with either end of the flat tool.

Our mentor taught us that the curved end can be used for “closing ranks”. When we’re finished examining a hive box, we use the curved end of the hive tool to torque all of the frames over one side of the box, then we push them back halfway. That way there is equal bee space on both sides of the deep.

The tool with the frame lifter is designed for just that purpose – to hook under the edge of a frame so it lifts enough to pick it out of the box. The flat end is used for prying and scraping the same as the standard tool.

Beekeeping life would be infinitely more difficult without hive tools.

The Smoker

You’ll want a smoker, fuel, and a reliable lighter. There are theories about why a smoker does what it does, but the result of smoking a beehive before and while you are working it is that seems to calm down the bees.

The beekeeper puffs cool smoke into the entrances and on top of the open hive before inspecting frames. Then he waits a while for it to spread throughout the hive boxes and calm the bees before going to work.

There is a skill in using a smoker. Being able to light the smoker and keep it going for a long time is not easy. I confess that this is something we haven’t taken the time to master.

Smoker Fuel

The fuels used vary with the beekeeper. You will find a wide variety of fuels available from bee equipment suppliers. There are pellets to start a smoker that flame immediately when lighted. Bags of cotton fibers or small rolls of burlap are available for smudgy, smoky fuel.

If you ask several beekeepers, you’ll find they use any number of readily available fuels. A friend uses old egg cartons and partially burned chunks of charcoal from his grill. We use shreds from our paper shredder to start the smoker, then add some cedar chips from the ground cover in our bee yard. The local coffee roaster gives burlap coffee away free to any beekeeper for smoker fuel (the owner is a beekeeper).

Our mentor has advised us to put green grass on top of the flames to help cool the smoke. You do not want to blow hot smoke on your bees.

Smoker Lighters

We unsuccessfully tried using the long skinny multi-purpose lighters that people use for grills and fireplaces.

Then a beekeeping friend hauled out his 14-ounce propane torch. What a game changer!

We now keep a bottle of propane and a spare with a self-igniting torch attachment in our beekeeping equipment.

What Is A Bee Brush?

You’ll find a bee brush on many tool lists. Some people use a large feather or a soft paintbrush instead of the bee brush.

The brush is generally about 14 inches long, with soft long golden yellow bristles.

It is used to move bees when you don’t want to or can’t shake them from their location. There are many uses for a brush. You’ll use this to get bees off of a frame, to brush off stragglers that have remained on honey super frames, to get swarm bees out of a box.

The common lore is that bees don’t like to be rolled, so be careful when brushing or you may wind up with hostile bees.

We don’t use our bee brush often, but we do use it and we’re glad to have it.

Do I Want A Frame Grip?

A frame grip is one of those nifty tools that you don’t need but it can be a real help when you want to pull a reluctant frame out of a hive box.

The tongs of a standard frame grip fit between frames, and when you close the handles, they seize the top of the frame so you can pull it out. Sometimes a frame is so messy, or so stuck, or the ends are so propolized that prying with a hive tool is less convenient than just gripping and pulling.

However, it isn’t that much more convenient that we use it regularly. It is just a tool in our kit that we pull out occasionally.

Do I Need A Frame Holder?

Have you ever seen a bathroom doorhanger for towels? A beehive frame holder is similar and can make your beekeeping life easier. It is a removable metal frame that hangs off the side of the hive that holds one to three frames.

When you are checking your frames, you can put the first few on the frame holder. Then you’ll have room to check and move the remaining frames inside the brood box.

The Toolbox

Eventually, you’ll want a toolbox of some sort to carry your equipment to and from your hives. We have metal baskets similar to the ones you find in supermarkets. Besides just sticking in the hive tools, smoker, propane torch, and frame grip, we have empty yogurt containers filled with smoker fuel, marking pens, queen marking equipment, and other doodads that we think we’ll need when we check the hives.

By far the handiest all-round useful piece of equipment we have, though it probably doesn’t go under tools, is a garden cart. We regularly haul hive boxes and other woodenware with us to the apiary. If you begin to have too much to carry as we do, you might consider getting a gorilla garden cart. I’m not sure if it’s a garden cart doing double duty for the apiary or if it’s the other way around. It is one of the best buys for the yard that we have made.

The Fun Stuff

After you get settled in and see how crazy you want to be about your beekeeping, there is a variety of toys – tools – you can add.

If you get into honey production, there are all manner of honey tools. You can buy capping scrapers, uncapping rollers, hot knives, a refractometer to measure the amount of moisture in your honey, a luggage scale to weigh your hives to check on honey stores, and a honey extractor.

To check on the bee cluster during the winter without opening the hive, you can get an infrared camera to do thermal imaging on your beehives.

When you really want to see what’s going on inside your hives, get an endoscopic camera. A friend of ours films his bees in all seasons of the year, inside the entrance, in the candy board feeder, in the brood boxes and honey supers.

Related Questions

What to wear when working with bees?

The essential pieces of clothing to wear when working with bees are a bee veil and hat, a jacket, heavy shirt, or bee suit, gloves, long pants, and some appropriate footwear that covers your feet. For a more detailed description of what you want to use, read What Do You Need To Know When Choosing A Beekeeping Suit.

How much does it cost to start beekeeping?

To begin beekeeping with one hive, all of the equipment, including hives, bees, clothing, tools, food and medication, it will cost around $600. The cost of beginning beekeeping with two hives is about $1000. We give a break down of the items and prices in the article How Much Does It Cost To Begin Hobby Beekeeping?

How much does it cost to buy bees?

A 3-pound package of bees with a mated queen will cost between $110-$150. A nuc (nucleus) of bees with bees, queen, frames with drawn comb and brood, will cost between $180-200.

How Do Bees Make Honey

From our point of view, beekeepers who just enjoy the bees for themselves, there is only one word for the way bees make honey. Magic! That isn’t really what happens.

How do bees make honey? Forager bees collect nectar from flowers, storing it in the honey stomach where it’s mixed with the enzyme invertase. They return to the hive where a worker bee takes the nectar by a regurgitation process called trophallaxis. The worker chews the nectar, adding enzymes, then deposits it into a honeycomb cell. Bees fan their wings, reducing the water content to 17 – 20%, then cap the cell with wax to maintain the low moisture content.

That’s a quick explanation of how honey is made. Read on for more interesting facts about bees and honey.

How Do Bees Actually Make Honey?

Here’s the full description of what happens from flower to honey.

What is honey made from? It is made of plant nectar, enzymes that the bees produce, and the process of evaporation.

There are four necessary steps:

forager bee collects nectar
worker bee takes nectar
enzymes change the nectar
water evaporates from the nectar

Forager Bee

A forager bee, the only worker bees who leave the hive, gathers pollen and nectar from flowers to bring back to the colony. These bees will fly as far as five miles away to find forage, though they will stay close to home if enough flowers are available.

Inside the forager, the nectar goes into a pouch, the “honey stomach”, in the esophagus before the stomach. If the bee has used all its own energy reserves, it may digest some of the nectar instead of returning it all to the hive.

Worker Bee

The forager bee flies back to the hive, where it hands off the nectar in a mouth-to-mouth transfer called trophallaxis, to a worker bee. No, this isn’t vomiting, which most of us know is an uncomfortable and nasty process. This is a regurgitation called trophallaxis, which several types of insects use. It’s similar to a parent bird feeding its young.

It is said that the worker bee then chews on the nectar for a half hour or so. A honey bee has no teeth, so don’t think of that kind of chewing. But it is similar in that when we chew, our saliva adds enzymes to what we’re eating to begin the digestion process. While the bee is “chewing”, it adds more enzymes to the mixture passed to it by the forager bee.

After the nectar has been thoroughly dosed with enzymes, it is put into a cell in the honeycomb, where it is spread out for evaporation. We may not think that an individual honey cell is a very large area but considering that a whole bee can fit into a honeycomb cell, it is, relatively, a big area.

Enzymatic Action

Here comes the science part.

First the nectar is mixed with the enzyme invertase in the forager bee’s honey stomach. The sugar in nectar is sucrose. Invertase converts the sucrose into dextrose and levulose, which are forms of glucose and fructose.

The worker bee adds additional enzymes.

The enzymes are acting on the nectar. Invertase converts sucrose to glucose and levulose. Another enzyme, glucose oxidase, changes some of the glucose to hydrogen peroxide and gluconic acid.

This is where part of the magic takes place.

Hydrogen peroxide helps keep micro-organisms from living in the nectar while it’s processing into honey.

What does the gluconic acid do? The honey becomes acidic, ranging from around 3.4 to around 6.1, averaging about 3.9. For comparison, neutral pH is 7. Most water is pH 7. Grapefruit is from 3.0 – 3.75 pH.

Because of the acidity, fungi, mold and bacteria won’t grow in honey. If someone asks how long is honey good for, there are two answers.

In the hive, honey will be good for a year or so. That’s around six generations of bees (not calculating for winter).

On your shelf, strained and in a jar, honey will last indefinitely. It may form crystals but heating it gently will dissolve them.

Water Evaporates

In the hive, honey will have a moisture content of between 17 and 20%. Then the bees will cap it with wax.

Honey can ferment if it has too much moisture. The USDA set the standards for Grade A and Grade B honey at a maximum of 18.6% moisture if it is to be sold. Grade C has a maximum of 20% moisture.

Beekeepers will use a honey refractometer to measure the moisture of their honey harvest.

The lack of moisture and the high sugar content make it a fatal medium for bacteria. This was used to advantage long ago, when honey was used to dress wounds.

How Many Bees Does It Take To Make A Teaspoon Of Honey?

An average bee will make only 1/12 teaspoon of honey. Total. Twelve bees will make one teaspoon of honey.

Even though bees are not very big, they can carry almost their own body weight in nectar.

This still doesn’t amount to much. Nectar is about 70% water. Honey is about 20% water. A forager bee, flying back to the hive with nectar, is carrying mostly water.

It has been said that a bee will visit up to a hundred flowers on one trip foraging trip from the hive. No, I don’t know who studied that, nor how many bees they followed to get that number.

How many flowers does a bee visit for honey? Golden Blossom Honey estimates that bees need to visit 2,000,000 flowers to make a pound of honey. This will take up to 55,000 miles of bee flying for foragers.

How many bees do you think it takes to make the pound of honey that you have sitting on your kitchen shelf? There are 66.6 teaspoons in a pound of honey. That is the life’s work of about 800 bees.

Do Bees Eat Their Own Honey?

Yes. The only reason bees collect nectar and make honey is because it is their primary source of food.

A hive will consume around ½ pound of honey per day (ScientificBeekeeping.com). Adults eat honey and they use it to make bee bread to feed the larval baby bees. Bee bread is made up of pollen – about 70%, honey – about 25%, and bee saliva.

The queen bees do not eat honey or bee bread. For their entire lives, they are fed royal jelly, which is made from secretions from the hypopharynx gland in the throats of nurse bees.

Bees eat their own honey as they go about raising the colony population, tending brood, foraging and storing honey from spring through fall. In winter, when it is too cold for flowers to bloom and too cold for bees to fly, the bees live off the stored honey.

What Do Bees Eat If We Take Their Honey?

If someone or something takes all the honey from a beehive late in the year when there are few flowers to forage from, the bees will starve.

It isn’t just humans who will take the honey from a hive.

Bears will destroy a hive to get to the honey.

The time from August through fall is considered robbing season. Yellow jackets, hornets, and bees from other hives will attack a weak colony, stealing honey, destroying wax comb and killing bees. It is very exciting, in a bad way, when robbing takes place. Angry bees are flying everywhere around a hive. It’s easy to tell that this is different than normal bee traffic because there are large numbers of bees mobbing the entrances and checking out any seams, holes or cracks in the hive boxes.

Bees may eat all their own honey long before winter. There was a severe August dearth the second year of our beekeeping. A dearth is a time when there are few blooms and those have little nectar. It can be because of the time of year or because of a drought. During this time, there was so little to forage, that our bees cleaned out all the honeycomb and we had to supplement with sugar syrup until there was a resurgence of blossoming in mid-September.

Related Questions

Are bees killed to make honey?

Good beekeepers only take surplus honey stores from their bees, not the honey frames the bees need for the colony. There are bee boxes called honey supers that are put on top of the brood boxes. After the bees fill the bottom boxes, they move up to the supers. It’s considered safe for colony health to take the honey in the supers while leaving the honey in the brood chambers below.

How do bees make wax?

Honey bees have eight glands on their abdomens that secrete flakes of wax.

Can you harvest uncapped honey?

Uncapped honey is still considered to be nectar by both bees and beekeepers, not honey, so it isn’t harvested. If you shake a frame of uncapped nectar, it will shake out of the honeycomb.

What Do Honey Bees Do in Winter

Our first year of beekeeping, we were so busy with all of the chores and newness of having bees that we didn’t stop to think about what happens to bees during the winter.

What do honey bees do in winter? When winter temperatures drop below 50° F, it is too cold for the bees to fly. In the hive the bees mass together around the queen to form what is called the winter cluster. They vibrate their flight muscles to generate heat up to 95° F in the center of the ball. They eat the honey and pollen that were stored during summer and autumn.

There is a lot that goes on in the hive leading up to and during the winter, so continue reading to find out more.

How Do Honey Bees Keep Warm in the Winter?

An unusual thing about honey bees is that they are one of a few insect species that can generate body heat, and not just a little. They accomplish this by flexing their flight muscles.

A bee can fly in temperatures in the 50’s Fahrenheit, because it is keeping itself warm. The wind passing over its body as it flies can cool the bee too much, so it can become sluggish. The bee may land and pump its flight muscles to warm up again.

They need to keep their flight muscles at 85 degrees or higher or they won’t be able to fly. At takeoff, their flight muscles reach nearly 100 degrees. If the bee becomes too cold and/or runs out its thirty-minute supply of stored body fuel, it won’t be able to get back to the hive.

Inside the hive, honey bees still use their flight muscles to maintain hive temperature. The connection between wings and flight muscles in the thorax is disconnected. The bees then rapidly flex or shiver their muscles to keep the high temperatures needed in the hive during cold weather.

There are three reasons to keep winter hive temperatures high.

The queen bee is essential to the hive. Worker bees may make all of the decisions for the hive, but it is the queen who lays the eggs and ensures the survival of the colony.

Brood, un-emerged baby bees, are the future of the colony. Although the queen doesn’t lay eggs during most of the winter, she does begin in early spring. These are the nurse bees and future foragers for the hive.

If the temperature inside the hive falls below 40 degrees, all the bees will die.

How Do Bees Survive Winter?

So, the bees have a heating system. Now what?

During the fall, the worker bees have been hard at it, storing honey and pollen for their food supplies for the winter.

As temperatures begin to drop, the worker bees push out the drones, the male members of the hive. The sole responsibility of drones is to mate with queens from other colonies during the spring and summer. They don’t even feed themselves. The worker bees feed them. Because they are nothing but a needless expenditure of food and energy during a time of stress to the colony, they are removed from the hive and aren’t allowed to return.

As temperatures drop into the low 50’s, the bees begin to form into a ball in the middle of one of the brood boxes in the hive. As temperatures continue to drop and the foragers stay indoors, the bees all cluster around the queen to keep her warm. Bees will go into empty cells in the wax comb to make the cluster. This way they can make as tight a ball as possible.

The center of the cluster will be from 85 to 95 degrees. It is around 85 degrees when the queen is in the center. When there is brood as well as the queen, the workers heat up the cluster to around 95 degrees. The edges of the cluster will be around 48 degrees.

An individual bee can generate up to 110 degrees of body temperature. The bees making the heat have been dubbed “heater bees”. The ones on the outside of the cluster are at much lower temperatures and begin to get sluggish. They are an insulation layer for the bees deeper within the cluster. As they get cooled, they migrate toward the center of the cluster and warmer bees become the outside until they, too, become cool and move inward.

During warmer days, the bees will move around within the hive. They will shift to be closer to honey frames. If the weather remains very cold, the bees might stay in one place. It can starve with honey frames only a few inches away. We saw this with some of our hives after our first winter. There were full frames of honey with a dead cluster of bees just a few frames away.

During winter months the bees feed on the honey and pollen that they stored during the summer and fall months. The more food in the hive and the closer to the cluster, the better. If a colony gets chilled, it will be too sluggish to reach honey stores just a few frames away.

Bees don’t need an external water source during the winter. Because everyone is in the hive and creating a lot of heat, humidity can build up in the hive. This provides enough moisture for the bees. In fact, too much moisture in a hive can kill a cool colony in the winter.

Bees do need potty breaks during the winter. They will stay confined for long periods, but on sunny days when the temperature of the hive rises, the bees will take what are known as cleansing flights to relieve themselves outside of the hive.

How Do You Take Care Of Bees In The Winter?

As I mentioned, during our first year of beekeeping, we had plenty to keep us busy. Then winter arrived.

We had a whole new learning curve with new terminology, new chores, and new equipment.

The winter process begins in the fall. The steps are:

fall feeding
combining colonies
moisture control
winter feeding
mite control

Fall Feeding

During the fall, after removing the honey supers (boxes of honey for the beekeeper), it’s important that the bees have enough honey stored in the brood boxes to keep them fed through the winter.

A hive will need 60-80 pounds of honey to get through the winter.

If there is what is known as a period of dearth, when not many plants are providing nectar and pollen, the bees may begin to eat the honey they have already stored. One year we found virtually all the honey frames empty at the beginning of September. This is when beekeepers need to feed their bees so they can store enough honey for winter.

Combining Colonies

There is a fine line that divides colonies that can survive the winter from those that can’t. Large colonies can create enough heat to keep the hive warm. But they require a lot of food. Smaller colonies don’t need as much honey and pollen stores, but with fewer bees, they will have a more difficult time keeping the hive warm.

I wish we had known more about this that first year. We had two colonies that were small. The appropriate steps would have been to decide upon the best queen of the two hives, kill the other queen, and then combine the two hives to make one. We would have had a chance of one surviving the winter. As it was, we lost two.

Moisture Control

Hot bees in a confined space will create a lot of moisture. Bees can tolerate cold much better than wet. There are two problems with damp. It can cool and chill the bees. It encourages the growth of mold, fungi and other unpleasant things. Think of a damp, cold bathroom in winter.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, our winter temperatures are mostly in the 30’s and 40’s. Instead of snow we get rain. Moisture is a big problem in the bee yards, so the quilt box is a standard piece of apiary equipment. No, a quilt box has nothing to do with patchwork blankets.

A quilt box is a wooden frame 2”- 4” deep that fits on top of hive boxes. Screen covered vents for air circulation are all along the sides near the top. The bottom is either wire mesh with fabric or just firmly attached fabric across the bottom of the box. The contents of the box vary, but the intent is the same – they should be able to soak up excess moisture, so it won’t drip into the brood box and onto the bee cluster. Some people use wood shavings and some use burlap bags for filler.

We have hamster bedding in our quilt boxes. We can lift the lid and stick our hands in to check the moisture level without letting air into the hive. If the bedding seems too damp, we scoop it out and put in dry. The box of old shavings gets set in a corner in the kitchen to dry out.

Winter Feeding

The girls (the bees) may eat up their honey stores and need to be fed. This is where the candy board comes in. It is a 2” high wooden frame with wire mesh on the bottom and the bee food is set into the frame on top of the wire.

During the winter, bees are fed solid food because syrup might freeze. There are several methods of feeding sugar during the winter. Some people cook sugar cakes to make bee fondant. Some make cakes without cooking them. And some people just use granulated sugar, either sprinkling it on top of the frames or setting a small bag of sugar on top and slicing through the paper.

Varroa Mite Treatment

The Big Bad for bees is varroa mites. They weaken bees, making the bees more susceptible to diseases. Varroa mites lay their eggs in open brood cells and attach themselves to any baby bees that are laid there. Winter, when most brood cells are empty and uncapped, is an excellent time to treat with oxalic acid vapors. Fogging hives once a week in January will ensure that all cells have been treated. This gives your bees a good, mite free start going into the spring population build-up.

It may sound as though there is a lot to do to keep your bees healthy and happy during the winter, but it takes little time and you are rewarded by seeing your “girls” coming out of hives in spring.

Related Questions

How many bees die in winter?

When going into winter, a hive may have 60,000 bees. Easily two-thirds of those could die over the winter. Many of those will just succumb to old age. Even with 20,000 bees, a hive will have a healthy start for spring.

Can you move a beehive in the winter?

Yes. It is easiest to move beehives in the winter because the bees aren’t going out of the hive and flying. Block up the entrances and move the hives. Professional beekeepers in the far north will sometimes move their hives into large storage buildings for the winter

What Do You Need to Know When Choosing a Beekeeping Suit

When we decided to become beekeepers, the first purchases we made were bee suits for each of us. They are worth every penny we spent in confidence, peace of mind, and reducing the number of stings we might have gotten.

The essential five pieces you want to have in a beekeeping suit are a hat, a veil, a jacket or full body suit, gloves, and foot gear.

Every beekeeper has an opinion on each of these items, so keep on reading to find out more.

Don’t Lose Your Head – Wear A Hat and Veil

This is the most important part of your bee gear. No one wants to be stung on his or her face or head.

Have you seen those silly videos of people running around, wildly slapping at bees? I did that.

One day when we were walking through the bee yard, a busy worker bee flew into my hair and got stuck by my ear. Despite being calm while tending our bees when I’m in a bee suit, this buzzing in my ear sent me running around the yard like a lunatic, whacking at my hair. You don’t want to do that when you’re working your hives.

Acting panicky around the bees isn’t good for you and it’s upsetting to your bees.

There are several types of headgear for beekeepers.

Hats and veils that are two separate pieces
Hats and veils that are attached
Hats and veils zipped to your suit
Hats and veils separate from your suit or jacket
And there are different styles of veil

The key points for a hat and veil are that you want good visibility, you don’t want any openings that bees can find, and you don’t want the mesh of the veil really close to your face.

We recommend you get a hat and veil that are of one piece and they attach to your suit or jacket. Parts won’t get separated and if you are zipped up properly, there is no place for bees to sneak in by accident.

The types of hat and veil combination that are attached and attach to a suit are generally the fencer type of hood and the round hat and veil.

We prefer the round hat and veil combination because it gives the best visibility, is comfortable, and the brim will block the sun. The only drawback to this type is that it can slide around on your head and tip a bit if you lean back (watching a swarm) or lean way over forward. Easily taken care of if you safety-pin a chin strap of elastic inside your hood. This also is great for keeping long stray hair from blowing in front of your face while you’re geared up.

How Cool Do You Want To Look – The Suit

If you want to be stylish, beekeeping gear isn’t the way to go. If you’re going to have beehives, style goes out the window, although I think we look especially dashing in our bee jackets and round hats and veils.

Choices – suit, jacket, or separate hood and a heavy shirt. We recommend that all your bee gear zips together, so a suit and hood or jacket and hood combination is ideal.

A full bee suit has some distinct advantages. It gives you one-piece coverage and keeps your regular clothes clean.

A jacket is just a bit easier to put on than a full suit. A jacket that zips up is easier to get in and out of than the ones that pull over the head.

If you buy it a size or two larger than you usually wear, it will be loose in summer and will fit over a heavy jacket in chilly months. I normally wear a women’s small size, but I have a large size beekeeping jacket. It works fine and isn’t too bulky.

Bee clothing is made of a variety of cotton and cotton blends of light to heavyweight. Some suits and jackets are ventilated.

We like 100% cotton of a medium weight. That works well year-round for us in the Pacific Northwest. Most summers here are moderate. When we get a hot spell, our mentor resorts to spraying down her bee jacket with the garden hose if she gets overheated.

Your climate will determine if you want light weight and vented or not.

Most beekeeper clothing is white in color. Bees don’t seem to mind big white beasts interfering with their hives. It is said that they can get more aggressive with black and dark colors.

The Great Glove Controversy

Always wear gloves. Never wear gloves.

Beekeepers seem to be more rigid in their views on gloves than for any other part of their bee clothing.

Our feeling is this. New beekeepers will feel more confident with gloves. A confident beekeeper is quieter and gentler working with his or her bees.

We wear gloves the majority of the time. Depending on the season and the temperament of our bees, we may take a short look at the girls without gloves. We always wear them for a full hive inspection.

We have used two basic types of gloves:

Leather
Dishwashing gloves or nitrile gloves

Generally, we prefer the precision and dexterity we have when using the nitrile gloves. However, I have been stung through them when I picked up a frame and squashed a bee under my fingers. Dishwashing gloves are similar for dexterity but are a bit sturdier.

We shifted to leather gloves for much of our work when we got two nucs with “Survivor Queens” that had a heavy Russian bee background. These bees are what we call “spicy”, generally more aggressive than our Italians or Carniolan bees.

As you gain more experience, you’ll form your own opinions on whether or not to wear gloves and which type you prefer.

Don’t Wear Sandals

Now that you have gotten suited up, don’t forget your feet. This should be obvious.

One summer a pair of potential new beekeepers came to the house to help us check our hives. We had veils, jackets and gloves for them to wear, but we couldn’t help them with the rest of their clothes. One was wearing cropped pants and they both wore sandals. Bees don’t stop at your knees!

No matter the weather, I generally wear boots with my pants on the outside. If you let your pants stay on the outside, you risk having a bee crawl up under your pants. If you work mostly from the side and back of your hives, you shouldn’t have many bees at ground level, so you are probably safe.

To be extra safe you can tuck your pants into your boots or wrap an elastic around your pant leg as bicycle riders do.

The Bottom Line

You will find what works best for you, but you’ll speed up the process if you can try on hats, veils, bee suits and gloves before you buy. Mentors and bee club members often are happy to look at or try on their gear. If you have a local beekeeping supplier, you can look and touch before you buy.

Our mentor had spares for us to use when we helped with her hives. We bought what we used there and have been happy ever since.

Warning – When a Bee Suit Won’t Work

There are three times when your bee gear won’t work. I’m not talking attack of killer bees, I’m talking about during normal beekeeping activities.

1. When you don’t wear it. You may find excuses: it takes to long to gear up; it’s too hot out. Bee gear is a fundamental part of beekeeping safety for both you and the bees. Take the time to put it on.

2. When you put on your gear but don’t take the time to check that it’s zipped up properly. Mike has been casual about zipping up properly a couple of times and has wound up with bees buzzing around inside of his veil. Not fun!

3. If a bee stings your suit or if you get honey on it, you will be a magnet for other bees. The sting will have the girls in defense mode and the honey will have bees flocking to the new chow line. Using the bee smoker on yourself or retiring for a while to do a quick wash of the area can help.

Related Questions

Can you get stung through a bee suit?

Yes, you can get stung through your suit if it’s snug against your bare skin, but if you have a loose suit, it’s unlikely. I have been stung through Levi blue jeans, so a standard heavy fabric is not sting-proof.

What about a bee suit for children?

A full body suit is what you want to buy for children who are helping in the bee yard. It’s a fantastic opportunity to let them see the wonder of bees and the joys of beekeeping. A full body suit will keep them safe and confident when they are around your bees.

Do beekeepers get stung a lot?

I feel safe in saying that beekeepers probably get stung more than non-beekeepers. This is something to consider if you are allergic to bee stings. If you are allergic and a family member has bees in the yard, an EpiPen is something you should have on hand. We also have Caution Beehives signs posted on the fence and gates to our yard.

What To Do After Catching A Swarm Of Bees

We caught our first swarm of bees in our first year of beekeeping – it happened to be from one of our own hives. The bees were in a cardboard box. Were we totally prepared? Not really.

What do you do after catching a swarm of bees? Shake the bees and queen from the capture box into a hive box with several frames removed. Gently add more frames, so as not to crush the bees. Close the hive, letting the bees settle in. Feed for a few days. If the frames have no comb or honey stores, feed the bees for several weeks until comb is drawn and the bees are building honey and pollen stores.

Of course, there’s more to know about bee swarms and what happens after catching one. Read on to find out more.

Did You Get The Queen?

If you’re still at the swarm site, the first question to ask yourself is whether or not you caught the queen.

If the swarm is in a nice compact ball and relatively quiet, and you managed to get it into the box the same way, chances are the queen is there, too.

If you’re uncertain if the queen is there, or if there are a lot of bees flying around, put a queen excluder over the top of the box and watch to see what the bees do. The queen won’t be able to get through the excluder, but the worker bees can.

The queen will be giving off pheromones that are like a homing beacon to the swarm bees. If the worker bees climb through the queen excluder out of the box and fly away, no, you didn’t capture the queen. If bees fly to the box and go through the queen excluder into the box, yes, you did get the queen.

If the queen isn’t there, look around to see if she dropped on the ground nearby and check to see where the bees are congregating. You may have to recapture the swarm.

If you caught a swarm without a queen, all is not lost. You can combine the swarm bees with a weaker colony in your apiary, making it a more robust hive.

Caught A Swarm, Now What?

Now that you’ve caught a swarm, you probably have it in a box of some sort.

It’s ideal to set a swarm into a nuc box or a deep that has a couple of frames in it, preferalbly with some drawn comb qnd with some honey stores.

A plain old cardboard box works well, too. We’ve done both.

When you get to your apiary, put the bees into their new home. If they are on a branch, put it into the hive. If the bees are in a box, carefully pour them into their new hive. Or shake them gently. Or scoop them into it. The best way to do it is whatever way you can get the most bees inside the hive without disturbing them any more than necessary. If they’re disturbed, they will fly.

Then set the mostly empty box near the hive entrance.

As the bees spread out into the hive, add frames until the box has the full number. If you have them, add some frames with drawn comb and some honey.

Our first swarm got a bona fide deep with frames, but we had to use scrap pieces of OSB for the top and bottom. The bottom was shimmed so the bees could enter – or leave! As the bees settled inside the hive, groups of five or six bees set themselves up on the sides and the front of the box, raised their abdomens, and fanned their wings, sending out a message to bees that this is where the queen is, this is home. By dusk, there wasn’t a single bee on the outside of the hive. All who could were inside.

That night we left them alone and did nothing more.

As for checking on them, we might inspect the hive in a day or two to check for the queen. After that, we usually inspect every week or two.

It is possible that the bees may not like the hive you have selected for them. This hasn’t happened to the local beekeepers we talk with nor to us. It has happened for some people.

Feeding A New Swarm Of Bees

Bees in the wild fend for themselves. Our goal is to make sure our bee colonies survive, so feeding a new swarm of bees can help them along.

The workers in a swarm are carrying some stores of honey and are ready to draw comb, but comb building from scratch takes a lot of work and a lot of food. The standard bee lore that is passed around is that for bees to make one pound of wax, they need to eat 8 pounds of honey.

In case you’re interested, those numbers are based on two studies. One was done in 1814 by F. Huber and one in 1946 by W. Whitcomb Jr. I haven’t read either one. I just assume that the bees need a lot of food to keep them going while they are building.

We feed the bees 1:1 sugar syrup. That means that the syrup is made with one pound of sugar to one pint (2 cups) of water. Many people cook this but our mentor said that two minutes in our Vitamix on high will work just as well.

We use a top feeder, which is easy to access, easy to check and easy to fill without disturbing the bees. There are several other types of feeders. We avoid using the ones that attach to the front of a hive on the belief that it might encourage robbing by other bees. That’s just third-hand information passed around our bee club. If it’s dry out, we will use Boardman feeders for water.

How long to feed the bees? When installing a package of bees into a hive with new foundation, we feed until comb is drawn and the queen is happily laying. This can take several weeks. Check your bees weekly to see what is happening in the hive. Don’t underfeed them.

What Time of Year Do Bees Swarm?

There is an old rhyme, an English proverb, about bee swarms.

“A swarm in May is worth a load of hay. A swarm in June is worth a silver spoon, but a swarm in July is not worth a fly.”

The gist of this jingle is that a swarm caught early in the season will build comb, have brood, and be fully functioning and foraging soon enough to produce extra honey that the beekeeper can take from the hive.

Our girls have swarmed in late June and early July, and so far, we have managed to recapture them. No, they made very little to no honey, so from that standpoint, they weren’t “worth a fly”. On the positive side, they have had good sized colonies and good honey stores to go into the winter. We think of them as free bees.

A swarm caught later in the year barely has enough time to establish its own winter stores of honey. It generally won’t have much, if any, extra for the beekeeper.

Do bees swarm in the fall? They can. There will be a very short foraging season for nectar and pollen for these girls to set up a new hive with. If you catch a fall swarm, be prepared to feed them continuously if you want the colony to make it through the winter.

What Time Of Day Do Bees Swarm?

We live in the moderately cool Pacific Northwest. Here swarms generally occur in the afternoon, and usually between 1 PM and 4 PM. Isn’t that precise? My guess is that early afternoon here is the warmest part of the day in springtime and early summer.

Areas of the country that have hotter weather than ours may find that swarms happen earlier in the day.

Don’t confuse swarming with orientation. During orientation, brand new forager bees hover in a group close in front of the hive and then fly off. They face the hive while doing this. These bees are learning where their hive is in relation to the sun and surroundings so they can return from foraging flights. This usually happens in the afternoon.

Swarming bees leave the hive quickly in large numbers, and the sky is filled with thousands of bees.

Related Questions

How many bees are in a swarm?

A beehive will have up to 80,000 in it.

A swarm will take 50-60% of the bees along with the queen. So, it is possible to have between 30,000 and 50,000 bees in a swarm.

Are bee swarms dangerous?

Please use common sense when reading the next few sentences.

The answer to this is for honey bees, not for Africanized “killer” bees.

Bees in a swarm are probably the calmest, most gentle bees you will encounter.

They are on a mission to find a new home with their queen. They aren’t defending the hive.

You can stand in the midst of the bees as they fly toward the place where they are going to cluster while scouts search out a new location. The noise will be loud but it is doubtful that they will even land on you. They are pre-occupied. I prefer being off to the side; I want no random bees stuck in my hair. You can stand near the cluster of bees and they will pay no attention to you. Usually this is the case, but, once again, use common sense if you encounter a swarm of bees.

Do bee swarms move?

A swarm leaves the hive and arrives at a place where the bees form a ball. Scouts are sent out. If they find a good location, the swarm will move there. If not, the bees may move one or several times while searching for the right new home. If you install the swarm in a hive that, for some reason they don’t like, they may swarm once again, looking for a new location.

What Causes Bee Swarms?

Why does a beehive swarm? The act of bees swarming and beginning new colonies is a way for the species to increase its population. The most common reason is that bees will leave a hive and swarm is that the bees feel crowded in their existing space and need more room to expand.