All about beekeeping at Sherborn Library

Recently, at the Sherborn Library, John Hedly presented information on how to get started in beekeeping. A director of the venerable Worcester County Beekeepers Association (WCBA), John shared his knowledge of the types of honeybees and the jobs they do, how to set up a hive, and how to gather honey.

Hedly got started in beekeeping because he found bees to be “fascinating little creatures” and felt he simply “had to work with them.” In his first year of beekeeping, he searched the Internet for information and went ahead on his own. Later, he found the WCBA and attended their outdoor meetings featuring demonstrations of beekeeping techniques. He also attended WCBA Bee School and worked with a WCBA mentor.

Hedly began his presentation by describing the three types of honeybees and the jobs they do. There is one queen bee in each hive. She is the largest bee. Her job is to mate with several male bees from different hives. Then she returns to the hive and begins to lay eggs, which she continues to do for lifespan of five years. In the summer, the queen lays 1500-2000 eggs per day. In the winter, she lays 100-200 per day. The queen has a stinger, but she uses it only to fight another queen.

Drone bees are males whose only job is to mate with a queen, while worker bees are females. Worker bees start to work on the day they are born and continue throughout their lives in jobs appropriate for their stage of maturity. Young worker bees clean the hive’s cells, feed larvae, and nurse pupae. As they grow older, they progress through more skilled jobs in the hive, such as wax production, honey sealing, honeycomb building, pollen packing, and removing dead bees. They also guard the entrance to the hive, bring water, and forage for pollen. Worker bees fly up to two miles to find pollen and nectar, and they usually die in the field at five weeks old.

To start beekeeping, Hedly said you will need a kit of the following pieces of equipment: a head veil, gloves with long sleeves, a brush to move bees, a hive tool to take frames out of the hive boxes, a frame hanger to hold frames removed from the hive when working, and a smoker to encourage bees to move down into the hive in order to work with the honeycomb frames.

A hive stack consists of a stand, bottom board, entrance reducer, one-to-three brood boxes in which the queen lays eggs and the worker bees tend to them, a queen excluder, a honey super box for excess honey production, an inner cover, and an outer cover. A beekeeper takes excess honey only from the super box, leaving enough for the bees to survive through the winter. To harvest honey, you first need to cut off the wax seal created by the worker bees and harvest the honey by hand or use a higher-volume extractor.

The color and taste of honey depends on where the bees get their nectar. Honey collected in April will be light, that collected in May-July will be medium, and that collected in August-September will be dark. Light honey has a mild tase, and dark honey has a richer taste.

For more information on programs available at the WCBA, see worcestercountybeekeepers.org,