James Wilkes - Honey

With beekeeping, honey bees are not livestock in the sense that they need tending day in and day out to where if you weren’t there for the chickens, they’d have some struggles. Honeybees are kind of in this in-between state, they are wild in some respect, but you are managing them, working with their biology and natural tendencies. As a beekeeper, knowing what those are and providing resources or kind of inputs to assist them to achieve what you want to do. So as a beekeeper it is very hands off, or observational. You need to touch the hives or be in them, every so often, it’s not every day but it’s more than even once a month is kind of the bracket depending on the time of year.

In the spring it’s a time of growth, new life, and abundance. The honey bees are like that too when they come out of winter they are growing really fast, the whole goal of that being hitting nectar flow, which is a natural occurrence in the flora at different times but the spring is definitely one of those times. So you manage those bees, your job is keep them healthy. Giving them everything they need to be healthy, just like humans they need food, they need shelter, they might be dealing with parasites and pathogens, viruses, so you at least need to monitor those and see if you need to do something - like when you get sick you either do something or if your immune system is strong enough because of something else you are doing, you eat really well then when you get sick your immune system can handle it, similar with bees. So throughout the season you are managing those stressors on the bees. So as a beekeeper you need to know what those are, know the biology of the bee, know what to expect when, and have the resources which would be either food or medication or management strategies to keep them healthy, hardware – that’s the housing part, and know which signs to look for, the different times of the year, what should you see.