Hi, I Planing to start be a bee keeper but i have few questions

General Bee Chat
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Hi, thx for viewing this topic,

i am in malaysia, there are few question trouble me,

1)Can i be a bee keeper in CITY?
2)How do we get honey?the bee will keep honey with baby?
3)If i am going to start, i need to spend a lot of time? any book can recommend?

***My English is no that good, if anything wrong, i apologize, thx

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Read the forum posts on basics, diseases and websites and join a bee club

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Hi,

Answering your questions in order:

  1. The first thing I recommend for any CITY beekeeper (we call ourselves urban beekeepers = same thing) is to check your city regulations. Malaysia is a well-organized but highly regulated state, so I am sure that they will have something to say about keeping bees inside the city. They may even prohibit beekeeping, it is YOUR job to check on that before you start anything at all. For example, I believed that my city did not allow beekeeping unless you had a 600 foot space around the hive. However, that changed in recent years, and now we are allowed to keep 2 bee hives on a property within the city limits, as long as there is 16 feet of space from boundaries, and you put a 6ft tall screen around the hives. That has made it possible for us to restart our hobby. :smile:
  2. Bees are complicated, they will keep some honey near the “babies”, but they also store some further away, if they have plenty. You need to read a lot more to understand bees before you start, otherwise you will have a lot of problems.
  3. Beekeeping doesn’t need to take a huge amount of time. If you have one or two hives, allowing 50 hours per year should be enough. Most of us open our hives to check on them one to 4 times per month in the honey flow season, and less than once per month over winter. Reading about the best way to look after bees will take many hours, even hundreds of hours, but you will only really learn by doing it yourself (with an experienced beekeeper if you can find one). There are a lot of good books, but none of them tell you everything. Beekeeping for Dummies is probably available in Malaysia. As a book, it is over-simplified and it has some dubious advice, but gives you some good basic ideas:
    http://tinyurl.com/zetogr5
    Michael Bush also has an excellent web site and book, but you will need some starting knowledge to understand what he is saying:
    http://tinyurl.com/gsgut95
    The Practical Beekeeper, Beekeeping Naturally, Bush Bees, by Michael Bush

Keep asking questions, and as @Valli says, best of all, join a local bee club BEFORE you start and ask a lot of questions from them too.

Dawn

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Sound advice @Lim_Vincent
The best way to learn is hands on so google a nearby beekeeping club and join. I’m sure you will be able to find somebody there to guide and help you

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As others said a local club or mentor can probably help you the most. They will know what works for your region and area of the world. So much changes depending on your weather and pests/diseases etc. Everyone has their own unique struggles.

As to your questions.

  1. Absolutely you can be a beekeeper in the city. This obviously depends on your local laws, some areas have more or less restrictions on how close to a property line it can be etc etc. However there are hives sitting on top of buildings in cities as large and as densely populated as Paris France. And they do quite well. There is often more forage for bees in a city because there are people who plant window boxes and flowering trees and things that don’t exist in the country.

  2. As to the honey, that is totally up to you really. There are many methods to extract the honey. The Flow frames are just one of many ways. You can crush the comb and strain out the bits of wax, you can use an extractor, you can cut the comb directly and eat the honey and the wax together. The bees will store some honey with the brood, however as long as your have a decent enough nectar flow they will make excess that people collect in the super, where there is generally no baby bees. Again there are many techniques to this but many people use a queen excluder which is a mesh sheet with holes that are big enough for honey bees but too small for the queen. That means that the queen can’t get into that area to lay brood, so you know your honey will be free of larvae

  3. One of my favorite books which doesn’t discuss the particulars of beekeeping as much as it talks about the philosophy of the hive and why and how they make their decisions is called The Honeybee Democracy. I have a much better understanding of the bees themselves after reading it. The internet is packed with information on how to do the actual beekeeping. Check out Michael Bush’s website for some good information. http://www.bushfarms.com/bees.htm Also youtube is a great resource to be able to actually see what it is all about instead of just reading about it.

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1)Can i be a bee keeper in CITY?

That depends on the laws in your city. I have had bees in the city most of 40 years.

2)How do we get honey?

You steal what the bees don’t need to get through the winter. The exact process depends on what equipment you have and what equipment you want to buy. But the simplest is you just cut the honey comb and eat it. Next is you mash it and strain it. After that you can buy an extractor and extract it. Or you can buy a Flow hive and just drain it.

the bee will keep honey with baby?

I’m not sure of the question. It’s your job to make sure they have enough honey.

3)If i am going to start, i need to spend a lot of time?

Bees are pretty self sufficient. You can spend a little time or a lot of time. You’ll learn more with a lot of time and if you get good at it, you can make more honey with more time.

any book can recommend?

There are many good beekeeping books and many of them are now available as scanned books online. You can read all of my book for free online or you can buy it. Here is the link to it online:

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