In this online course you learn how to manage your busy life and beekeeping hobby with the support of a passionate mentor who will guide you through a beekeeping year.
About this course
In this online course you learn how to manage your busy life and beekeeping hobby with the support of a passionate mentor who will guide you through a beekeeping year.
We start this course with a look at a glance at the most important factors in any beekeeping activity.
We found seven main factors that matter in beekeeping, with the beekeeper in the center. Having clarity on each of them helps you make better decisions and manage your activity better.
This part is focused mainly on the beekeeping legislation in Ontario, Canada.
The presentation (both video and PDF) and course content for this part include references to the bee laws and associations in USA.
If we compare beekeeping with driving a car, many will say that we don’t actually need to know what happens under the hood to be able to drive it. True, until we start to have problems. But while we can take a car to the mechanic to fix it, with a beehive we need to fix the problems ourselves. And it is cheaper to learn to do it ourselves, than to pay the mechanic for a house visit.
If we don’t know the bee biology, we won’t be able to understand why we don’t get the expected results we want. This can frustrate us to no limits!
Then we look at the bigger picture, which is the biology of the colony. We’ll learn about the members of the colony and what their role is.
We will also learn about the bee breeds we can find in North America and how to choose the breed that will offer the most success for us.
We will continue by studying the life cycle of the colony, how it grows, becomes an adult and multiplies. By understanding the two modes of operation of the colony, we will be able to stir it in the direction we want without too much trouble. If we do not do that, we can lose production and sometimes even the colony itself.
After we learnt how the colony functions, we must see what diseases it can suffer from and how to prevent them or treat them when they appear. Again, if we do not learn this, we can suffer total losses, because for one specific disease the only treatment is by burning the hive completely!
Beekeepers massively underestimate the importance of monitoring the levels of the Varroa mite parasite that is a vector for many other diseases and most of the time leads to the death of the colony in the second season or sometimes even sooner. That is the reason for integrating a usually separate course in the basic beekeeping course. It is one of the keys to avoid wasted resources.
Beekeepers, even experienced ones, makes observation and draw conclusions. Sometimes, these conclusions prove to be false thanks to discoveries by scientists. Together we shall find more about the honey bee and why we should care about her complex yet not so complex biology and life.
Watch few questions that participants had related to the biology of the honey bee colony.
Honey bees are social creatures and they live as one in the hive. Now we shall discover together how the honey bees in the bee hive become one. We learn about the cyclical nature of the colony's life and what do we, beekeepers, do about it to help it develop in a healthy way AND, preferably, staying in our apiary :)
In this part we learn about he instinctual mind of the honey bee hive and how communication takes place inside it.
A honey bee colony inside an apiary, in man made bee hives, has certain challenges different than honey bees in the wild. We, the beekeepers, need to take really good care of them and be aware of those challenges as we can influence their lives tremendously.
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