How Beekeeping Works

By: Dave Roos
bees, beekeeping
Humans and bees have enjoyed a unique agricultural relationship for millennia. Here, a beekeeper inspects a frame of built-out honey comb. Onfokus/Getty Images

Honeybee colonies are ingenious engines of productivity. An individual worker bee may take on seven different functions in her short six-week life, from wet nurse to wax producer to ventilator to far-flung forager [source: Alvéole]. And male drones, well, they get one shot at glory before being dragged out of the hive and sacrificed to the winter cold.

All in the name of honey, the golden energy source that will get the colony through the winter and keep the intricate, interconnected life cycle going.

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Beekeeping, when you get down to it, is the art and science of stealing honey from these hardworking bees without them knowing it. A beehive may be manmade, but the bees are very much wild animals doing what millions of years of evolution have taught them to do. The goal of the beekeeper is to keep the bees happy and healthy enough to do all the work while he collects the sweet, sweet profits.

Why Keep Bees?

Beekeeping is booming. In the United States alone, there were 2.67 million honeybee colonies as of 2017 [source: statista]. There are countless numbers of backyard beekeepers who have caught the "bug" and turned a pastime that was once reserved for hermit monks and rural farmers into a trendy hobby for suburbanites and urban lifehackers.

The attraction of beekeeping is obvious. Beyond the initial investment in some hive boxes, basic beekeeping equipment and bees, it doesn't require a lot of time, maybe 30 minutes a week plus two annual harvests. Then there's the daredevilish allure of playing with stinging insects, always good fodder for cocktail party conversation. And at the end of the day (or year), you get honey. Jars and jars of it. And who doesn't love honey?

But beekeeping – like growing your own organic vegetables or training a dog or raising children – is also harder than it looks. The weather is unpredictable, raining too much when the flowers are blooming, or not enough. Honeybees are susceptible to any number of pests and diseases, which you must learn to screen for and treat. If your hive is really healthy, it might swarm and you'll lose your best queen. Plus, bees sting. A lot.

Find a Mentor

Which is why our first tip about beekeeping is not to go it alone. Find yourself a beekeeping mentor. Most cities, towns and counties have a local beekeeping society. Join it. Go out with seasoned beekeepers and see their hives. Try to absorb their mountains of advice and then invite them over to help you load your first package of bees into the hive. And again, when you're not sure if your brood frames look right. And again, when you think you've spotted a queen cell, but you're not sure.

With a little luck and a lot of help, anyone can be a beekeeper. And there's nothing quite as satisfying as holding up that first dark amber jar of sweetness to the light, feeling its weight and thinking, "My bees made this for me" (though they really didn't and it's highly doubtful they're even aware of your existence).

Whether bees are actually aware of it or not, humans have enjoyed a unique agricultural relationship with them for millennia. Let's start with a trip back in time to meet the very first beekeepers.

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The History of Beekeeping

history, beekeeping
Antique illustration of an apiary with skep hives. Nastasic/Getty Images

The first human beekeepers weren't "keepers" at all, but foragers of wild honey. In the Cueva de la Araña (Cave of the Spider) near Valencia, Spain, is a cave painting dating from 9,000 B.C.E. clearly depicting a brave man climbing a tree to stick his hand directly into a beehive [source: Comunitat Valenciana]. The prehistoric artist even sketched a few honeybees buzzing nearby.

Domesticated beekeeping was a common practice throughout the ancient world, starting at least as early as 2500 B.C.E. in Egypt and likely even earlier in China. Depictions of beehives and honeypots, and beekeepers using smoke to calm bees, were found on the walls of the Sun Temple of the Egyptian pharaoh Nyuserre Ini, and intact clay and straw hives from 900 B.C.E. were discovered in archaeological sites in Israel [source: Galway Beekeepers' Association].

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Aristotle wrote about beekeeping and bee behavior in his book "Historia Animalium," and the Chinese statesman and philosopher Fan Li explained the benefits of a wooden hive box in his treatise "Golden Rules of Business Success" circa 500 B.C.E. [source: Foundation for Agriculture].

The first domesticated beehives were fashioned from the hollowed-out stumps of trees and fallen logs, which were natural destinations for swarming honeybee colonies. To harvest the honey, the hive would be cleared of bees and destroyed, the comb squeezed to extract the golden goodness.

Around 2,000 years ago, beekeepers began using the first artificial beehives, called skeps [source: Galway Beekeepers' Association]. Skeps look like overturned pots and were made from either baked clay or woven straw. A small hole near the bottom of the skep allowed the bees to come and go, and the comb was laid down inside.

Even though skeps are rarely used today outside of the developing world, the enduring image of the beehive – and of hardworking industry – is still a woven straw skep.

The use of a skep, unfortunately, still required the destruction of the hive, and often the death of the entire colony, to harvest the honey. So, beekeepers began looking for alternative hive designs.

Wooden hive boxes became more common by the 18th century, leading to Francois Huber's moveable hive or "leaf hive," a vertical stack of moveable book-like leaves, each holding its own section of comb. Those containing honey, and not brood, could be removed without disrupting the colony, but Huber's hive design never really caught on [source: Stamp].

Moving into the 19th century, other innovative apiarists, including Thomas Wildman, began experimenting with "bar hives," wooden boxes that are equipped with a row of bars across the top under which the bees build their comb in small hanging sections. Each section could conceivably be removed by lifting up on the bar, but not without some effort. The sections of comb would often get stuck together or to the side of the box, requiring a messy cutting job that destroyed comb and sacrificed honey [source: Borst].

The Langstroth Hive

Then came Lorenzo Langstroth, a minister and avid bee hobbyist from Pennsylvania, who is credited with discovering "bee space" and revolutionizing modern beekeeping.

In the 1850s, Langstroth built a wooden hive based on his observation that bees wouldn't build a comb in a space tighter than 1 centimeter 3/8 of an inch) [source: Oertel]. He invented a type of hanging bar hive with removable frames spaced exactly 1 centimeter apart and 1 centimeter from the box walls. Frames heavy with honey could be easily removed without sticking to or disturbing neighboring frames.

Langstroth hives are still the most popular hives for professional beekeepers and hobbyists, and we'll talk more about the parts of a Langstroth hive in the beekeeping equipment section. But next, let's cover the basics of honeybee biology and colony structure.

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Honeybee Biology and Colony Structure

bees, brood
The brood chamber is the place where the queen lays her eggs and where the larvae, as seen here, are fed and kept warm. Eric Tourneret/Getty Images

Of the 20,000 species of wild bees, only the Western honeybee (Apis mellifera) is used in the United States and Europe for honey production [source: Galway Beekeepers' Association]. That's because the Western honeybee's unique biology and "superorganism" structure allow beekeepers to work in tandem with nature to share in the bee's bountiful honey harvests.

Honeybees are social insects that live in highly organized colonies with complex divisions of labor. A honeybee colony is called a superorganism because the survival of the entire colony depends on the coordinated actions of individuals. Working together, bee colonies build and maintain hives, regulate the hive temperature, reproduce and raise young, and collect and store food in the form of honey and pollen. None of them could do it alone.

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Queen, Workers and Drones

A honeybee colony contains between 60,000 and 100,000 individuals composed of three types of bees: workers, drones and the queen. Each bee plays its own critical role in helping the hive thrive in the spring and summer and survive the cruel winter months in northern climates.

The vast majority of bees in a honeybee colony are worker bees. Worker bees are sexually undeveloped females who are responsible for just about everything that happens in the hive besides mating and laying eggs. Their small bodies are equipped with special scent glands, pollen baskets and brood food glands that allow them to perform a litany of different labors in their short lives (six weeks in the spring and summer, and up to six months in the late fall to survive the winter) [source: MAAREC].

Worker bees are in charge of building the wax comb that holds eggs and developing pupae (known as brood), feeding the brood, taking care of the queen, guarding the hive entrance from robbers and other pests, ventilating the hive, foraging for pollen, nectar and water, and capping the precious honey stores.

Every honeybee colony has only one queen at a time. The queen's only job (and it's an important one) is to lay eggs. The queen is about twice the size of a worker bee and can lay up to 1,500 eggs per day, 250,000 eggs per year and close to a million over her lifetime, which can span several years. The overall health of a honeybee colony depends largely on the quality of its queen and her egg-laying prowess [source: MAAREC].

Drones are male bees with one simple task: mate with the queen. Mating happens in mid-air outside of the hive. The queen can mate with a dozen drones at once, storing their sperm in a special sac from which she can release measured amounts at the moment of laying her eggs [source: Orkin]. Drones are born from unfertilized eggs and are only allowed in the hive during the spring and summer. When winter sets in and resources are scarce, the drones are forced out and left to die.

A successful beekeeper must understand both the life cycle of individual bees and the life cycle of the larger colony superorganism. For example, a bee colony has different nutritional requirements during different seasons of the year, and if left to its own devices, a thriving colony in the springtime is likely to raise a second queen and swarm to a new hive site. All of this needs to be carefully managed if the beekeeper wants to benefit from the bees' hard work.

But before we dive deeper into starting a beehive and managing a bee colony, it's time to talk equipment.

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Beekeeping Equipment

smoker, bees
The smoker is a key piece of equipment for a beekeeper. It releases a steady, gentle stream of smoke, keeping the bees calm while the beekeeper works. StefaNikolic/Getty Images

First, a word of caution. If you're new to beekeeping and eager to set up your first hive, avoid buying secondhand beekeeping equipment or inheriting used boxes and tools from a friend or neighbor. As we'll discuss in our section on bee diseases, the bacteria that causes American and European foulbrood can linger in old equipment and spoil your beekeeping adventure before you even begin. New, clean equipment is your best bet.

The Langstroth hive is the most popular hive for both beginning and experienced beekeepers, so that's what we'll focus on in terms of equipment. But know that there are alternative hive setups like Warre and top bar hives, each with its own advantages. Warre hives more closely replicate the space within a hollow log and are prized by "natural" beekeepers, while top bar hives don't require the lifting of heavy boxes, which could be better for older beekeepers or those with physical disabilities [source: PerfectBee].

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The basic structure of a Langstroth hive starts with a large lower box called a hive body, or brood chamber, which is set aside for the bees themselves. The hive body is where the bees build the comb in which the queen lays her eggs, and this is where the bees raise brood and store honey for their own use.

On top of the hive body is a second, shallower box called a honey super. This is where the bees store surplus honey during the "nectar flow," which happens during certain months of the year when local flowering plants and trees are in full bloom. The beekeeper harvests the excess honey from the super.

A Langstroth hive includes other pieces that make hive management easier and maximize the honey harvest. Each hive box contains removable frames that hang vertically and are pre-printed with beeswax or plastic foundation to spur the formation of the tell-tale hexagonal honeycomb cells.

A special cover called a queen excluder is placed between the lower hive box and upper super with slats precisely spaced to allow only worker bees to pass through. This prevents the queen from laying eggs in the honey super.

A feeder is necessary to supply the bees with extra nutrition when nature's nectar and pollen resources are low, such as during later summer and winter. The simplest type of feeder can be made by filling a small Ziploc bag with sugar water and laying it across the top of the brood frames in the hive box with a small slit cut into it for the bees to feed. Other feeders attach to the entrance of the hive or hang vertically in place of a brood frame. All feeding methods, like many of the elements of beekeeping, have their staunch adherents, detractors and their pros and cons [source: University of Georgia].

Tools of the Trade

Then there are the beekeeper's tools. First, the protective clothing. All beekeepers wear at least a veil that protects their face and neck from stings. Many others choose to wear a full-body protective suit plus gloves. Some experienced beekeepers prefer to work without gloves and minimal protection. It can get hot in all that gear and once a beekeeper has some experience working with bees, she will know what level of protection she is most comfortable using.

Every beekeeper needs a smoker. A stream of cool smoke puts bees in a mellow mood, which is exactly what you want when you're poking around in their hive. A smoker looks like an elongated metal teapot with a spout and a handle. The handle has a trigger that operates a bellows inside the smoke chamber to fan slowly burning cardboard, dry leaves or other materials.

A hive tool is a small metal bar that has many uses in a beehive. It is used for prying open parts of the hive boxes that have been glued together by propolis, also called "bee glue." Bees produce propolis by mixing saliva and beeswax with resinous material gathered from botanical sources and they use it to seal up gaps in the hive. A hive tool is sharp enough to scrape away propolis and old comb, but won't gouge or damage wood like a screwdriver or putty knife. A hive tool is also the perfect implement for helping the beekeeper to gently pry up frames to remove them for inspection.

We'll talk about honey extraction tools in a minute, but before we jump to honey harvesting, let's walk you through the basics of starting up your first hive.

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Getting Started as a Beekeeper

kid, beekeeping
Beekeeping is a hobby that even young children can enjoy. Teresa Short/Getty Images

Once you have your hive boxes, protective clothing and tools, it's time to pick a location for your hive. Make sure you follow all local ordinances about the number and location of hives. Consider your neighbors and direct bee traffic by facing the entrance of the hive away from a neighbor's property. A nearby bush or fence line will encourage the bees to fly upward when leaving the hive, which also lowers the odds of accidental stings. You want to make sure that your bees have unobstructed access to the hive entrance and that you have plenty of room to work around your hives on all sides.

The ideal location will be protected from strong winds and face south or southeast to maximize morning sun. The early sun gets the bees moving in the morning to forage in the springtime. But any spot with dappled sun and shade will do.

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You'll also want a water source nearby. Bees forage for water, which they bring back to cool the hive and blend with pollen to make a special treat called bee bread [source: Bee Built]. If you don't have a pond or creek on your property, consider installing a small bird bath or putting out a large platter of water with sloped sides. Providing a water source will prevent the bees from wandering onto a neighbor's property.

Now that you have a spot for your hive, it's time to buy some bees! There are two main ways to get bees. The first is to buy a package of bees, which costs between $80 and $140 for 10,000 bees plus a mated queen [source: PerfectBee]. Packages should be ordered in the winter from a local bee supplier and picked up in late March. Always buy your bees from a local source to avoid causing your bees the stress of shipping and to ensure that they are already acclimated to your locale. You will receive them in a shoebox-sized cage with the queen separated in her own cell.

After smoking the bees to calm them, open the cage and shake the bees into your hive box. Then place the queen cage in the hive box, without setting her free. The cage is plugged with a candy cork that the bees will slowly eat away over the course of a few days. During that time, the queen will be emitting her pheromones, critical to winning acceptance from the hive.

Since the queen is pre-mated, once she's free she'll immediately start laying eggs and the colony will be on its way.

A second option is to buy a preloaded hive box that's already stocked with an active queen, eggs, brood, pollen stores and honey. That type of hive box is called a nucleus colony or a "nuc" for short. Nucs run from $120 to $200 and arrive in their own small hive box with five or so frames containing freshly laid eggs, brood, honey and pollen, active workers and an accepted queen [source: PerfectBee]. Simply transfer the frames and bees into your hive box (don't lose the queen!) and you're good to go. Most often, bee sellers will "mark" the queen with a small dot of paint, which helps the beekeeper to identify and locate the queen.

Of course, nothing is "simple" when you're a beginner working with living creatures. So next we'll talk about hive and colony management, particularly disease management.

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Hive Management

hive, management
Successful hive management depends on three main activities: feeding your bees, avoiding a swarm and checking for and treating against mites and other diseases. vgajic/Getty Images

Remember, the entire goal of beekeeping is to get the colony at maximum strength right as the local flowering plants and trees are blooming and the nectar flow begins. This will spur the bees to store lots of excess honey in the honey supers and ensure a hefty harvest for the beekeeper.

Successful hive management hinges on three main activities: feeding the bees, avoiding a swarm and checking for mites and other diseases.

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Since beekeepers harvest their bees' excess honey stores ("steal" is such an ugly word), this lost nutrition needs to be supplemented through feeding. In most locations, natural nectar and pollen resources are low in the late summer and fall, and dangerously so in the winter. During those times, the bees will be fed with a sugar water syrup of equal parts sugar and water, or even two parts sugar to one part water when resources are the most scarce [source: University of Georgia].

With the help of your beekeeping mentor, learn how to remove and examine brood frames to check for healthy pollen and honey stores. Learn how to lift the back of a hive box to test its weight and know if honey stores are low and extra feeding is required. Since pollen is the bees' chief protein source, ask your mentor about commercially available pollen supplements.

A healthy and well-fed hive will produce so much brood that the hive box will become overcrowded. The bees' natural response to overcrowding is to swarm. When bees swarm, half of the colony escapes with the original queen and the other half stays in the old hive with a new queen, though sometimes the entire colony will abscond with their queen.

If you have a healthy and productive queen, you don't want to lose her to a swarm. So, your options are to grow your beekeeping operation by splitting the hive, or avoid overcrowding by removing brood frames and giving them to fellow beekeepers. AS you get to know your bees and your hives, you'll get to know which behaviors are normal behaviors, such as bearding, and which might signal an impending swarm.

bees, bearding
Bees bearding on the front of their hive on a hot summer day – a perfectly normal behavior that helps bees regulate hive temperature.
Teresa Crowder

Swarming season is early spring, around March or April in most of the U.S., so beekeepers need to prepare by checking their hives for signs of an impending swarm, most importantly the presence of queen cells, which are oversized brood chambers that look somewhat like a peanut, where the colony is raising a new queen.

If your intention is to split a hive yourself – move half of your colony to a new hive box in a new location – then you need to remove all queen cells from any brood frames that you'll be placing in the new hive. Then you'll need to locate the original queen and transfer her with a good supply of brood frames, pollen and honey (your own homemade nuc, essentially) to the new location. The old hive will raise a new queen from the queen cells and continue humming along [source: University of Georgia].

You can also avoid splitting or swarming entirely by keeping your colony small enough to manage in one hive. This requires either having multiple hives between which you can move around brood frames to keep them equally full, or beekeeping friends who will take your excess brood to balance out their own weaker hives.

Which brings us to the third major responsibility of a successful beekeeper: disease management. This part of beekeeping is critical, so keep reading to learn more about managing the most common honeybee problems, especially the nasty varroa mite.

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Disease Management in the Apiary

diseases, beekeeping
A beekeeper uses formic acid to treat his bees against deadly varroa mites. SashaFoxWalters/Getty Images

No discussion of beekeeping is complete without talking about the varroa mite. This parasitic pest, no larger than the tip of a needle, first arrived in the U.S. in the late 1980s and has quickly become the most common cause of bee death and colony failure. According to the USDA, 42 percent of commercial beehives were infected with varroa in the spring of 2017 [source:USDA].

Varroa mites harm bees in several different ways. A mated female mite will crawl into the brood chamber of a developing bee and lay eggs on the larvae. The baby mites will feed on the bee pupae, either killing it or deforming it. Other mites will attach themselves to adult bees and feed on their blood. While the blood-sucking alone can kill bees, it's also a portal for infecting the bees with a number of deadly viruses that can spread quickly to take out a whole colony [source: NC State Extension].

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It's important to test for varroa infestations throughout the year and treat your hives accordingly. One of the most popular ways to test for varroa is to buy a special sticky board from a bee supply company. The board sits below a mesh on the bottom of the hive box, which keeps bees from getting caught on its gluey surface, while allowing dead mites to fall through. After 24 hours, you check the board and count the number of mites.

Another method is the sugar shaker technique. First, you equip a small mason jar with a lid made from 1/8-inch (3-millimeter) mesh cloth. Remove the lid and dump in approximately 200 bees from the hive. Add 2 to 3 tablespoons of powdered sugar, screw on the lid and shake. The open the jar and shake the sugar-covered bees over a white napkin or cloth. The mites should fall out onto the cloth, allowing you to count them. More than 10 mites for every 200 bees means that you have a mite problem [source: NC State Extension].

Treatment methods for varroa mite range from powerful insecticides to dusting the brood frames with powdered sugar or talcum powder, which causes the mites to lose their grip on adult bees [source: NC State Extension]. Organic beekeepers looking for a stronger but natural solution often use formic acid. Pads soaked in the acid, first isolated from ants, are laid on the top of the hive, but only when the temperature is within a certain range and not during the nectar flow season. The fumes from the acid can even penetrate brood cells and kill mites feeding on bee larvae [source: Bayer].

Another common honeybee disease in the U.S. is American foulbrood, a bacterial disease that kills brood larvae in their cells, eventually leading to colony failure. American foulbrood gets its name from the distinctive sulphurous odor emitted by a brood frame infected with the disease. Telltale signs of foulbrood are sunken and darkened caps on the brood cells or irregular brood patterns on the frame.

Unfortunately, there's no cure for American foulbrood, which means the colony and all hive equipment must be destroyed.

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Harvesting Honey

Harvesting, honey
Fresh, organic honey is one of nature's perfect foods. It is sterile and storable straight out of the comb if handled properly. gustavo ramirez/Getty Images

Of course, the sweetest (ha!) part of beekeeping is harvesting all that delicious honey. If you only have one hive, it isn't necessary to invest in a lot of extraction equipment. But as you get more serious about your hobby, or if you intend to sell your honey, you'll want to buy more equipment to make extraction and filtering more efficient.

The beauty of honey is that it doesn't need any processing or purifying. Honey is sterile and storable straight out of the comb if handled properly. Large commercial honey companies sometimes pasteurize the honey before jarring, but that's only to kill off any yeast carried by pollen in the honey, which isn't bad for your health, but can affect the color of the honey and speed crystallization [source: LocalFloridaRawHoney].

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To remove honey-filled frames from a honey super, it's helpful to shoo away as many bees as possible. Smoking will drive some bees down into the hive box, but some beekeepers also use a bee brush to brush bees away, or a special electric blower [source: Staton]. Once the honey frame is free of bees, place it inside a separate box with a lid while you remove the rest of the frames.

To extract the honey, you'll first need to uncap, or remove the wax covering, from the cells of the frame so that the honey can flow. There are special scrapers and heated knives for this purpose, or you can heat up your own large knife in some boiling water and experiment. Save the waxy caps to melt down and make your own beeswax products like candles.

An extractor makes the next part easy. You place the uncapped frame in a large tub equipped with a hand-cranked or motorized centrifuge. As the frames spin, the honey flies out against the walls of the extractor and settles at the bottom, where there's a handy spigot. The honey can be filtered of any wax bits or insect parts by running it through cheesecloth or a fine mesh screen.

If you don't have an extractor, you can simply lay the uncapped frames on a rack over a large pot or tub and let the honey ooze out slowly. Remember to flip the frame over and empty the other side.

Jars of raw honey will literally store forever. The honey may start to crystallize and change color after a time, but crystallization is easily reversed by placing the jar in a hot water bath.

For more experienced beekeepers, the honey harvest can be timed to coincide with the flowering of specific plants and trees, creating a single-source honey with a distinct flavor profile. Professional beekeepers will transport hives across a state and even across the country to catch a particularly bountiful nectar flow from a prized variety.

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Lots More Information

Author's Note: How Beekeeping Works

I was once stung by the beekeeping bug. At the time, I was a part-time organic vegetable farmer, raising and selling veggies at our local farmer's market. As part of my back-to-the-earth ethos, I wanted to produce my own honey. A beekeeping friend told me about a neighbor who died and left behind boxes and boxes of active hives. Did I want one? I immediately went out and bought a full bee suit, smoker and hive tool. Excited, we drove my friend's truck into the backwoods of Pennsylvania to pick up my new hive. The boxes were stacked in an overgrown field and a storm was rolling in. The bees were none too happy to see us. They stung every tiny patch of bare skin they could find and buzzed angrily as we loaded them into the truck. The rain poured down so heavily that we couldn't get them all the way to my garden, so my friend offered to babysit them until I could come back and relocate them to their permanent home. They never left his place, and my suit never again made it out of the box. Homemade honey, I decided, tastes just as good when it comes from someone else's home.

Special thanks to Mark Bedillion of Bedillion Honey Farm in Pennsylvania for his expert advice on the art and science of beekeeping.

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  • Stamp, Jimmy. "The Secret to the Modern Beehive is a One-Centimeter Air Gap." Smithsonian.com. Sept 6, 2013 (July 23, 2018) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-secret-to-the-modern-beehive-is-a-one-centimeter-air-gap-4427011/
  • Staton, Stephanie. "How to Harvest Honey." Hobby Farms. Jan. 18, 2016 (July 23, 2018) https://www.hobbyfarms.com/how-to-harvest-honey/

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Honey Badgers Don't Care Because They're Ferocious

By: Jesslyn Shields | 

honey badger
A honey badger (Mellivora capensis) carries a young pup in her mouth at Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park in South Africa. Derek Keats/Flickr ( CC By 2.0)

Unless you were living in an internet-less cave in 2011, you've probably heard of the honey badger (Mellivora capensis). That year, the YouTube video below went viral — it's now been viewed over 100 million times, which is a lot for something that isn't a Beyoncé music video — and its refrain, "honey badger don't care," became the mantra of millions for a while. [Note: Video contains some language that may not be suitable for young or sensitive viewers.] This collage of National Geographic footage showing honey badgers eating snakes with their sharp teeth, running backward and chasing jackals, dubbed over by expletive-laden narration, is so entertaining, Taylor Swift has admitted to being able to recite the entire video by heart.

And although the honey badger has established a lasting place in internet culture because of this three-minute comedy bit, its celebrity makes us think we know more about this strange, solitary animal than we actually do. The truth is, honey badgers aren't well understood because they're extremely difficult to study.

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Honey Badgers Are Nocturnal Foragers

"How honey badgers became famous in America is incredible," said Derek van der Merwe with the Endangered Wildlife Trust in South Africa, when we talked to him in 2019. "We get so many calls from Americans wanting to come to film them because of the famous YouTube clip. They don't realize how difficult it is to film a honey badger because they're very intelligent, a lot of them forage at night, and they have extremely big home ranges — some of them up to 310 square miles [802 square kilometers]."

Honey badgers, or ratel, as they're often called in some parts of Africa (a word that might be derived from raat, the Dutch word for honeycomb), are fierce mammals more closely related to a weasel, or a member of the weasel family, than a European badger, although they look a bit like a badger with a weird white bowl cut that extends all way down their back. Their diet doesn't actually include very much honey, though their weakness for beehives often gets them in trouble with humans. The honey badger is omnivorous and honey badgers eat all kinds of things. In this respect, the honey badger truly doesn't care whether the thing they're eating is a plant or animal, whether it was dead when they found it, whether their prey is five times bigger than they are or whether they might have to fight seven adult lions off their dinner once they kill it. Snakes make up about a quarter of their diet. The honey badger eats what the honey badger wants to eat and the honey badger's diet is quite varied.

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They also don't much care what sort of habitat they hang out in — honey badgers occupy a wide range of habitats, from forests to deserts, but mostly live in dry areas of Africa, the Southwest Asia and India. Male honey badgers have giant ranges of up to 190 square miles (500 square kilometers), which they mark with their signature stink bomb scent and patrol constantly. Female honey badgers have smaller territories of up to 60 square miles (150 square kilometers), and they leave urine notes for male honey badgers at shared latrines when they're ovulating to let them know it's time to meet up.

Honey badgers also don't care very much about other honey badgers — they're solitary creatures, meeting up every so often to mate, but leaving each other alone for the most part, with the exception of mothers caring for young.

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The Honey Badger Is the "World's Most Fearless Creature"

Honey badgers are intelligent because they have to be. In the wild they will kill and eat up to 60 different species of animal with their strong claws, from venomous cobras to bee larvae, and in order to have a diet with this impressive range, honey badgers not only need to have problem-solving skills, they have to be some of the most adaptable creatures in the animal kingdom in the way they solve problems. The honey badger regularly needs to be able to dig, climb, squeeze themselves in and out of tight spots with a flattened body and solve new puzzles in order to survive — they have even been observed using tools to get what they want, which is a hallmark of uniquely intelligent animals like primates.

Honey badgers have become synonymous with unhinged aggression and ferocity — Guinness World Records has named them "World's Most Fearless Creature" — and particularly tenacious professional athletes sometimes earn "honey badger" as a nickname. The honey badger's reputation is for being nearly indestructible, but the truth is, they're short (about 11 inches [28 centimeters] at shoulder height) and not very fast, so they're sometimes attacked and killed by other animals and larger predators. However, the honey badger's skin is very tough and they have strong legs and 1.5 inch (4 centimeter) claws that can crack open a tortoise shell. So, for a honey badger, the best form of defense from larger predators is attack.

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honey badger
The honey badger will eat just about anything it stumbles upon, dead or alive.
Wikimedia Commons (CC BY SA 4.0)

"The honey badger's thick skin is loose — so loose, in fact, that they can almost turn around completely within it," said van der Merwe. "If an animal bites the honey badger on the back, it can turn right around and bite the animal right back with its sharp teeth. They have long claws on their front feet and strong legs that they use for digging, but which they use for fighting as well. Inexperienced predators — a young leopard, lion or hyena, for instance — might try to attack a honey badger once, but they'll never try it again after the first time."

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Honey Badgers Are Tolerant of Snake Venom

Honey badgers often tangle with venomous snakes, but one misconception is that honey badgers are naturally immune to venom. While it's true that the honey badger, a member of the weasel family, eats a lot of venomous animals, their immunity needs to be developed over time. How honey badgers acquire this immunity is not well studied or understood, but mother honey badgers spend a long time raising each pup (14-18 months), and as the honey badger baby grows, its mom slowly introduces it to venomous animals, starting with the mildest scorpion and moving up the venom ladder until the youngster is eating cobras and puff adders.

Scientists have studied why the honey badger is so tolerant to snake venom because their tolerance might give us some keys to creating more effective antivenoms to treat people who have been bitten by snakes. It seems the honey badger and its ancestors built up a resistance to these compounds on a molecular level over generations. For instance, one neurotoxin found in cobra venom fits into a special receptor in you or I that would really mess up our day — it would basically shut down our respiratory muscles. In a honey badger, this receptor has mutated to the point that the neurotoxins just can't fit into that receptor anymore — like a round peg in a square hole.

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Another thing we get wrong about honey badgers is that we think they have some sort of weapon like porcupine quills or that they're like skunks — that they spray a strong, unpleasant-smelling liquid at their attackers to gross them out (and away). It's true that the honey badger stores a revolting-smelling substance in their anal pouch, and honey badgers occasionally release it when they're in a life-threatening situation, but they don't weaponize it in the way skunks do.

"Often, when we find dead honey badgers, they've been stung to death by bees and have released this substance — it smells absolutely terrible," said van der Merwe. "It's not something you ever want to get on yourself because you will never get it off."

In fact, this anal glad secretion can be detected by a normal person's nose from up to 130 feet (40 meters) away. Some researchers have suggested that the substance has a calming effect on bees.

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Honey Badgers Love Beehives

Be this as it may, the honey badger can't get enough of beehives, but while they can endure many, many bee stings, ransacking a hive is a potentially deadly hobby for a variety of reasons. For starters, bees can be dangerous, but also humans can be dangerous. When honey badgers were first described in South Africa, they were often found in bee's nests, apparently feeding on honey (hence, the common name), but it turns out the honey badger was really interested in the bee brood — the nutritious bee larvae found in honeycomb.

"In South Africa, the honey badger was listed as near threatened in the early 2000s," said van der Merwe. "Beekeepers were killing them because they were causing hundreds of thousands [of dollars] worth of damage to the beekeeping industry, breaking into hives for the bee larvae that honey badgers eat. Not only do they destroy the hive itself, the beekeeper loses honey and the swarm of bees — it's actually quite a lot of money. Some badgers just learned to just live off sacking beehives, and they were being persecuted for it."

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But over the past two decades, the relationship between badger and human has gotten better:

"What we did in South Africa is start raising the hives off the ground by 1.1 meters [3.6 feet], or strapping them together or to tires on the ground. This prevents the honey badgers rolling the hives, which is how they access them," said van der Merwe. "In the early 2000s, half the beekeepers we surveyed admitted to deliberately killing honey badgers because they were costing them so much money. Since we've come up with these methods for preventing the badgers from accessing the hives and the bee larvae found in them, beekeepers are no longer killing them, and we've noticed an increase in numbers and in range in some areas. They've since been downgraded to a species of least concern."

Which is great news, because even though they've got terrible personalities, honey badgers are good for the ecosystems they live in. Because the honey badger isn't as fast as other predators, they'll dig rodents out of burrows, providing food for birds of prey and jackals, which often follow a honey badger around, waiting to catch the honey badger's prey, or tidbits like leftover bee larvae.

It's OK, though — the honey badger don't care.

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How Bee Sting Therapy Works

By: Maria Trimarchi

Nobody WANTS to get stung by a bee, right? Actually, yes they do.
Nobody WANTS to get stung by a bee, right? Actually, yes they do. © ERIK DE CASTRO/Reuters/Corbis

It may sound a bit incongruous: Encourage bees to sting you? On purpose? Using toxins to heal what ails us may sound like contradictory, and perhaps even dangerous, advice — but for at least 5,000 years humans have relied on venom, of all things, for medicinal purposes.

Take Mithridates VI of Pontus, Rome's formidable enemy during the first century B.C.E., for example: Steppe viper venom was allegedly used to save him from a life-threatening battlefield wound. Scorpion venom has a long history in both ancient Egyptian medicine and in traditional Chinese medicine. Beekeeping and honey harvesting are seen in artwork dating back to our ancestor's cave painting days, and bee venom is known to have been used in East Asia since the second century B.C.E.

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Bee sting therapy, commonly called bee venom therapy (BVT), is the medical use of the toxic compounds in honey-bee venom (BV), also known as apitoxin, in a therapeutic way. BV therapy is part of a larger medical philosophy and treatment called apitherapy (bee therapy), a type of holistic therapy that uses not only bee venom for its healing properties, but several bee products, including beeswax, honey, pollen, propolis (bee glue) and royal jelly in treatments. It was Hungarian immigrant Bodeg Beck who, after meeting beekeeper Charles Mraz, introduced apitherapy to the U.S. in the 1930s, and for more than 60 years Beck used BVT to treat patients with arthritis pain.

The history of venom collection is a fatal tale for honey bees. Bees were forced to sting hard surfaces, such as plastic or rubber, for venom collection, a practice that was fatal to the bee when her stinger inevitably separated from her abdomen after hard-surface-stinging injuries. Alternatively, venom was also harvested by crushing honey bees — a practice which, yes, was also fatal for the bees. Stinging hard surfaces, such as plastic, or thick surfaces, such as human skin, is dangerous for honey bees. While it's possible for the worker bee to sting more than once, it's actually the injury to her stinger apparatus — the venom sac, abdominal muscles and nerve center becoming crushed or dislodged — rather than the act of stinging that's fatal to the bee. Honey bees can sting as many as 10 times under the right circumstances.

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Promising Poisons: Compounds in Honey-bee Venom

Most bees aren’t actually very aggressive, so it takes some effort to get them to sting.
Most bees aren’t actually very aggressive, so it takes some effort to get them to sting. © BEAWIHARTA/Reuters/Corbis

Syringes make it easier to inject venom, but before there were needles there were, well, stingers. Modern practitioners often still use the live honey bee herself as the delivery vehicle for venom. Tweezers are used to place and hold the bee directly on the part of the body being treated; in doing so, the bee, instinctively, stings (although some may require a little nudge — most honey bees aren't aggressive until you provoke them).

When bee venom is delivered via syringe, it's first collected not by crushing honey bees but, usually, with an electroshock treatment that's mild enough not to injure the bees yet strong enough to annoy them into stinging. Their venom is collected from pre-positioned collection plates. While in the wild it's unusual for the full contents of the venom sac to be used in one sting, it is not unusual for therapy bees to do so, producing between 0.15 and 0.3 grams of venom per sting [source: Krell]. Depending on the individual and the condition being treated, the BVT schedule may vary; it could be as many as hundreds of stings per week. While that may sound like a lot of stings, on average, an adult can safely withstand the effects of 10 bee stings per every 1 pound (0.5 kilogram) of his or her body weight [source: USDA].

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Only 22 percent of honey-bee venom is pharmacologically active — the remainder is just water. Scientists have identified amines, enzymes and peptides that are responsible for the pain of — or allergic reaction to — a sting. The largest percentage, 52 percent, of active components in bee venom is a peptide called melittin [source: Downey]. Melittin is toxic to humans and destructive because it pokes holes in cell walls. Melittin poisoning is associated with a powerful, burning pain because it tricks the body into thinking it's on fire. More than one toxin is released during a honey-bee sting, though. Apamin, for instance, is a neurotoxin that blocks the body's ability to regulate neural activity, including impacting how fast neurons fire and the plasticity of our synaptic connections.

Additionally, two enzymes, hyaluronidase and phospholipase A2 (bvPLA2), together make up between 11 and 15 percent of bee venom. Hyaluronidase dilates blood vessels, triggering inflammation throughout the body. Phospholipase A2 breaks down cell walls, decreases blood pressure and suppresses the blood's ability to clot. It also triggers the body's production of prostaglandins, used to regulate the immune system's inflammatory response. Together these enzymes activate the body's immune cells and produce an antibody called immunoglobulin E (IgE); this plays a part in the body's allergic response to the sting [source: Bowling].

Peptide 401, a mast-cell degranulating peptide (MCDP) also found in bee venom, plays a role in the body's allergic response. Mast cells are found in the connective tissues throughout the body, mostly near the surface, and are vital in the body's defense against pathogens. They signal the immune system to intruder alerts and play a role in triggering the release of histamine. At high levels, MCDP is known to be epileptogenic, a neurotoxin that causes epileptic seizures.

The swelling and itching associated with bee stings is caused by the small percentages, just 1 to 2 percent, of dopamine and noradrenaline, which increase the body's pulse rate and the levels of histamine produced [source: Ali].

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Emerging Scientific Evidence, and Risks, of Toxic Therapies

A bee sting therapist’s clinic in Jakarta, Indonesia.
A bee sting therapist’s clinic in Jakarta, Indonesia. © BEAWIHARTA/Reuters/Corbis

Venom, surprisingly, isn't all bad news. Although venom isn't a popular therapy in Western medicine, growing scientific evidence is beginning to affirm what ancient healers have practiced for a long time: Honey-bee venom may be an effective and lasting treatment against a handful of neurological and immunological ailments, including multiple sclerosis (MS), and the venom shows promise as a therapy for several more conditions.

Emerging scientific data of the beneficial role of apitherapy suggests the venom may help decrease inflammation and improve circulation, and it may help encourage a healthy immune system. Bee venom has been studied as therapy for a list of diseases, and while most are considered too small or otherwise inconclusive, some results do stand out.

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It turns out that melittin, for example, is a pretty powerful anti-inflammatory compound that triggers the body to produce cortisol and is estimated to be 100 times more potent than cortisone [source: Downey]. It may be a potential treatment against bacterial and fungal infections because of its antimicrobial properties; in the right dose, the toxin weakens a cell until it pops, and it's that ability to destroy one cell without damaging another that prompted scientists to explore its efficacy against diseases including certain types of arthritis and cancers, in addition to HIV and the aforementioned multiple sclerosis (MS).

And roughly 2 to 5 percent of the active compounds in bee venom is a peptide, adolapin, which has antipyretic analgesic properties — and that means, like acetaminophen and ibuprofen, adolapin is an effective anti-inflammatory and pain-blocking agent. Protease inhibitors make up just 2 percent of bee venom: A protease is an enzyme that can separate a protein into peptides, and protease inhibitors block the enzyme's ability to do that. Protease inhibitors are also associated with anti-inflammatory properties and hemostasis (which is the body's way of stopping you from bleeding when you're injured) [source: Ali].

Scientists in both Greece and South Korea independently published findings that honey-bee venom interferes with the production of a compound called interleukin-1, one of 11 cytokines associated with arthritic pain and inflammation — and that means, at least for the majority of study participants, BVT is effective in reducing symptoms of arthritis.

In a small study, bee venom, in the form of bee venom acupuncture, was successful as a Parkinson's disease treatment; researchers theorize the apitoxin may work in a similar way as the botulism toxin, causing temporary muscle paralysis. Additionally, after a 30-day course of BVT, men with symptoms of enlarged prostate, specifically benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), reported significant symptom relief [source: Lukits]. And when we look at anecdotal evidence, data suggests bee venom may also be effective treatment against post-herpetic neuralgia, a side effect of the Shingles infection.

Apitherapy is considered experimental medicine and is not sanctioned or regulated by the FDA for any purpose other than for allergen immunotherapy, also called desensitization therapy. But that hasn't stopped the experimental therapy from gaining followers. Acupuncturists and naturopaths, plus a limited number of Western-medicine-practicing physicians and nurses, recommend or practice the therapy. Some beekeepers who supply BVT patients with bees also become expert in BVT treatment and methods.

Reactions to bee venom therapy are usually local reactions such as itching, pain, redness and swelling; however, bee venom may cause whole-body allergic reactions. A small percentage of people — an estimated 1 to 2 people out of 1,000 — suffer severe allergic reactions, which begin immediately or within 30 minutes of exposure, while anaphylaxis, a life-threatening allergic reaction, occurs almost immediately [source: ARS]. Those undergoing BVT should be prepared for an allergic reaction not only after the first BVT session, but as a risk after each and every of them.

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Author's Note: How Bee Sting Therapy Works

Although honey and other bee products have a long history in human health care, bees aren't the only bugs used as drugs. Ant venom, too, is effective in reducing the swollen joints and inflammation associated with rheumatoid arthritis. For instance, cantharidin, from blister beetles, is a power wart treatment. Maggots' ability to successfully heal treatment-resistant wounds, including removing dead or damaged tissue (debridement) and disinfecting the area, is impressive, and they've been useful in the healing process for both chronic and post-surgical wounds, including in modern medicine.

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