Getting started with Beekeeping in Michigan
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EmailFebruary 25, 2025
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Have you wondered if beekeeping is right for you? Have you considered keeping honey bees to produce your own, local honey? Honey bees are awe-inspiring, but keeping them healthy takes a lot of learning and hard work. Before you get started, find out what costs, time, and effort are required. Learn what beekeepers do and where they can go for education, resources, and support.
The 2025 MI Ag Ideas to Grow With conference was held virtually, February 24 - March 7, 2024. This two-week program encompassed many aspects of the agricultural industry and offered a full array of educational sessions for farmers and homeowners interested in food production and other agricultural endeavors. More information can be found at: https://www.canr.msu.edu/miagideas/.
Video Transcript
So, my name is Ana Heck. I'm an Apiculture Extension Educator at Michigan State University, and I'm going to talk today about getting started with beekeeping in Michigan. So I work for MSU Extension, and we are open to everyone. We work with people all around the state. All right, so we'll get us started here by just introducing ourselves to the different members of the honeybee colony. On the left, we have a worker bee. So most of the bees in the honeybee colony should be worker bees. They are females. They have barb stingers, so their stinger will normally get caught in you if they try to sting you, and they will die within a few hours of stinging. And in a normal healthy colony, most of the bees are going to be worker bees. In the middle, we have the male, which is a drone. Drones they don't have stingers, they can't sing. You can pick them up all day long and they won't sting you. Normally the colony only raises drones in the spring and summer and you only expect to find drones in the colony spring through fall. In the fall, the drones will actually get kicked out of the hive, so they normally don't winter with the colony. In the winter, you don't expect to find drones in the colony. In the summer, you might expect a small portion of the total number of bees to be drones. And then on the right, we have a honeybee queen, and she is normally we just have one queen per colony, although there are some exceptions. She does have a stinger, but she does not have a barb stinger. It's smooth, so if she stings, it won't get caught, and it won't mean that she will die after stinging. It's incredibly rare for beekeepers to actually get stung by queen bees. And then on the left here, we have the different body parts or segments of the bees. So we have their head, their thorax, which is their middle section. It's where their wings are and their legs are. It has all the, a lot of muscle in it because they need those muscles for their wings for flying, and then at the bottom here we have their abdomen. Hey, so here is our queen. Oftentimes, in a colony, the queen is going to be surrounded by worker bees, and what we call retinue behavior, and that is where the bees are the workers are feeding her, they're grooming her, and they're spreading her scent or pheromones around the colony. In practice, if you're a beekeeper opening up a hive, a lot of times you don't see this retinue behavior or you don't see the workers attending to the queen because you've disrupted the colony by opening up the hive and bees are just kind of going wherever. The main job of the queen, her main function is to lay eggs. So here we have a picture of hexagonal cone, and in each cell, there's an egg. And I will tell you that if you're seeing eggs on the screen, it is normally not this easy to see them in real life, because they are really small. You'd normally need pretty good lighting in order to see them, and it really depends on your vision. So some beekeepers use lighting or magnification devices to see eggs a little bit better. But this is what we want to see. When a queen lays an egg, it should just be one egg per cell and in the middle of that cell. So this looks really good. And the queen can lay over 1,000 eggs per day. So this is really her main function is laying eggs, and then the presence of her scent or pheromones lets the other bees know that she's present and that the colony's queen right. Those eggs develop into larvae, and when they're in the larval stage, they are fed by adult worker bees. Adult workers have glands in their head called hypopharyngeal glands, where they're able to produce food for developing larvae and they feed it to them. Um, as the larvae are growing. Then when the larvae are old enough, they give off a chemical signal, and that lets adult workers know to cap off the cells with wax and then the brood begins the pupation stage. The three stages of development for brood are egg, larval and pupil. When it's capped like this, that's the pupil stage. The the pupil develop under the cappings and they'll emerge as adults. Here we have our drone. One way you can normally identify a drone is by their big eyes. They have really big eyes. They have a different body shape too from the workers. Here's a drone in between some worker bees. In the middle, we have the drone with those really big eyes and that wider abdomen next to some workers for comparison. Right. And then we have our workers, and our workers are very appropriately named because they do a lot of work. So their main functions are to when they're younger, do a lot of the tasks in the hives, so they will clean the cells. They will attend to the queen, they'll feed the developing brood. And then as they're older, they will forage for four things. They will forage for nectar, pollen. A lot of times people think of pollen as being yellow or orange, but it can be all kinds of colors. It can be brown, red, gray, green. This is a worker with pollen on our hind legs. Honeybee workers have a part of their hind leg called a pollen basket or a cubicula, and that's where they're able to pack in pollen to bring it back to the hive. And then these also forage for resins. Resins are normally reddish or yellow in color, and when they're in the hives, it's called propolis. They're resin from plants, and they do make it a little bit harder to keep these sometimes because everything sticks together with these resins. We use a tool called a hive tool to pry open bars or frames and boxes. So it's sticky, it stains clothing, but it also has a lot of antimicrobial properties. There's a lot of research now on the benefits to the honeybee colony of having propolis in their hives. All right. Then the fourth thing that they forage for is water. Bees will forage water. All right. So here we have just the development time of the queen worker and drones. Queens have a shorter development time than workers and drones. All of them are eggs for three days, and then the larval stage varies. So for queens and workers, it's going to be five days. For drones, it's going to be seven days. And then the pupil development time also varies. So queens and workers are females. They develop from a fertilized egg, and any fertilized egg has the potential to develop into a queen or into a worker. What changes that trajectory is the food that they're given as young larvae. So if the if there's a fertilized egg that's laid, that means it's going to be female. If the workers choose to give that young female larva, royal jelly in kind of a different proportion and quantity of food, that will change that larva's trajectory, so she develops into a queen instead of into a worker. And then the drones develop from unfertilized eggs, and they have a longer larval development time and a longer pupil development time. And the drones, their main function in the colony, is really outside of the colony. So mostly their function is reproduction with queens from other colonies. So when drones are old enough, they will leave the hive and they will hang out in an area in the sky called the Drone congregation area, and that is where they will wait for young female queens to come by for mating flights. Queens can mate within the first couple of weeks of their life and after that, they're no longer able to mate. When there's a young new queen, before she's able to lay, she will go on mating flights. And she will mate with, you know, sometimes a dozen or a couple dozen drones. And then she has an organ called the spermatica where she's able to keep that sperm alive from those mating flights. And so the queen, after those couple of weeks during her mating flight, she will no longer be able to mate, but queens can live for multiple years and they're still able to lay fertilized eggs because of that spermatheca organ. Drones, on the other hand, will die after mating, and the drones fly normally a shorter distance from the hive than queens do, so that helps prevent some inbreeding. And this illustration is from the beekeeping and Northern Climates, Third Edition manual, and that's from the University of Minnesota Bee Lab. And so this is an excellent resource. One of the things that we suggest when you're looking for resources on beekeeping is to, you know, think about similar climates. It's really different to keep bees in places like Florida and Texas than it is in places like Michigan and Minnesota. So the nice thing about using Minnesota resources is that they tend to be pretty similar in terms of their seasons and the beekeeping management. So this is a nice resource if you're looking for just guide that covers a successful management strategy for keeping colonies healthy and alive in northern climates. All right. So our honeybees are not native to the Americas. The honeybees that we manage in the United States are from different parts of Europe. Honeybees we have here in Michigan are mostly from parts of Europe. That's important, I think, to think about, there's a lot of different species of bees. We only have one species of honeybee in Michigan, but we have over 400 species of bees total. So a lot of the species of bees we have in Michigan are native. Honeybees, on the other hand, You know, we think of them more in terms of livestock and in terms of their function than we do in terms of conservation like some of our other species of bees. So there are many species of native bees that aren't managed like honey bees, and we think a lot about how to support them through conservation. Some of these species of bees seem to be doing really well, others seem to be in decline. Honey bees, on the other hand are kind of more managed as livestock, primarily for honey production and pollination. So when we think about our honey bees, we really do think about them as animals or livestock that we're managing. And I put a picture of my dog on the screen so that we can have a little bit of a comparison. But like my dog, honeybee colonies need food, water, shelter, and medical care. So we'll get started with food here. So a lot of times, honey bees are flying from their hive and they're getting their food, which is nectar and pollen from flowers. However, they're not always able to have access to floral resources. So they're foraging for nectar and honey, so nectar, and the nectar is a sugary liquid substance from the flowers. The bees bring it back and they have to dry it out. They have to dry a lot of the water out of it. Once the moisture level is low enough, they'll cap it with wax, and that's normally when beekeepers call it honey. And honey and nectar is just full of carbohydrates and sugar's what bees need for those long foraging flights and they need that honey to survive the winter. So right now in February, colonies in Michigan are clustered. They're eating honey to have enough energy to move the muscles in their thorax where they're near their wings. And so the bees are eating that honey in order to have enough energy. All right. And then the pollen is where there's a lot of protein, fat, vitamins, and minerals. And that's really important for the development of bees. All right. And this is a really sad photo, but I wanted to show it because I think it's important that bees can starve unfortunately and it does happen. One thing that can happen is that the colony goes into winter without enough honey. And so here we have a frame of dead bees on this comb and there's just not any honey in sight for them. So this is really why when we're talking about honeybees as livestock or animals that we take care of, you know, oftentimes they get enough nectar, honey from the environment, but not always. So it's the beekeepers responsibility to make sure that the colony doesn't starve. Then here's another picture of a colony that's starving. So unfortunately, if the colony isn't able to get enough food, it can then start cannibalizing the brood, which is what we're seeing in this picture. This is something that we worry about a lot in the spring because colonies that go into winter consume their honey stores all winter long, and then we might get to a point in the spring where the colony is raising a lot of brood. There's a lot of mouths to feed. Maybe there's a lot in bloom, but then in Michigan, we might get these periods where it's just too cold or too wet for the bees to forage from the hive, and then that's when a colony can starve pretty quickly. So it's just important for the beekeeper to really take care of the colony and prevent starvation. So we feed honey bees. There's several different ways that we can feed sugar syrup. This is one example in the photo where it's a bucket with some holes on the bottom, and then the bees have access to the bottom of the bucket. There's frame feeders, there's top feeders, there's all kinds of feeders to feed bees syrup. And we normally do these feedings when the colony is very small in size, so small in population. If we need the bees to draw out a lot of comb, our worker bees have glands in their abdomens where they're able to produce little flakes of beeswax, that's how they build all of that comb. Normally they need access to either a lot of nectar or a lot of sugar syrup in order to make new beeswax. Sometimes there's just not enough food available in the environment. Sometimes if a colony is sick, it can help them to have a good nectar flow or to have access to feed. And then sometimes there is a lot of bloom, but there's just not good weather for flying. It might be too cold, it might be too wet, and it can be extremely windy. And then sometimes, you know, the colony has honey, but there's just not enough for it to go on into winter or through the spring so then we'd want to feed it as well. A nice resource on honeybee nutrition is from the Honeybee Health Coalition. They have a free guide that's online and that will give you a lot of information on nutrition of bees and then supplemental feeding. All right. Then like most other animals, our honeybees need water, and they especially need water when it's really hot outside. Our honey bees will go to a water source and they will collect water and bring it back to the hive, and they use their wings fan it and evaporate it to cool down the hive. Water is really important. Normally, the bees will find a water source and then they will continue to return to that water source. So sometimes they even leave a little bit of scent there and on a hot day, you might find hundreds of bees foraging for water at the time at any given time. This is one way that unfortunately our honeybees can be a pretty big nuisance to neighbors is if we have the bees decide that the water source is going to be, for example, the neighbor's swimming pool or bird bath or other place where the neighbors aren't expecting to see hundreds of honeybees. That brings me to the generally accepted agricultural management practices or the GAAMPs. These, are, you can find them. They're part of Right to Farm. They're on Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development's website, they provide guidance and recommendations on caring for animals, but in this case, honeybees and reducing disturbance to neighborhood properties. They're not regulations or laws, but they do have recommendations. And if you are a beekeeper and you're following the recommendations outlined in the GAAMPs and you receive a nuisance complaint, then you can request a letter from Michigan Right to Farm describing that you were adhering to these best practices in the GAAMPs. It doesn't offer full protection, but it does give you um some protection in case you end up getting a nuisance complaint. In general, it's just good practices to abide by to reduce being a nuisance. One of the suggestions will be to establish a water source close to the bee hives early on in the season. Normally, then the bees will go to that close water source and then that can help them leaving your property and getting water from other sources. If you wait too long to establish that water source, the bees will likely still continue to go to the water source that they already discovered, even if you put water closer to their hive. Um, so just something to think about. All right, and then like other animals, our honeybees need shelter. Honeybees are cavity nesters or Apis mellifera, the species of honeybees we have here is a cavity nester, so they normally in the wild, they would be in the tree cavity. We like to manage our bees in hives. The hive style you see in this photo is called the Langstroth hive. This is the most common hive style, and it's nice because it allows the beekeeper to do regular inspections. It also allows the beekeeper to add on boxes throughout the season as the bees need more space, and then to take them off as the bees need less space and as we're harvesting honey. So technically, the hive is the home where the equipment, where the bees live, and the colony is the group of honey bees. But you'll find that beekeepers very often use these words pretty interchangeably. And here in this photo on the right, we have a cluster of bees in the winter. So if you were to open up a hive in the winter, you would find the bees all clustering, and this is how they stay warm. They get really close together. Again, they use the muscles and their thorax that middle body segment to shiver and generate heat, and they consume honey in order to have the energy to do that. So here we have a picture where we really encourage beekeepers to think about the hive boxes differently depending on whether they're used for the colony year round or they're used for streplis honey. So the bottom two boxes in this picture are what we would call the brood chambers, and these are boxes where the queen is laying eggs. These eggs are developing the larvae and then pupae. Normally, the workers will put pollen around the brood nest, and then there will also be honey in those boxes. And then because honey bees, they don't have a mechanism to know when they have enough honey stored for winter, they will keep bringing nectar back to the hive as long as there's empty comb above the broods and they have space to store it. Normally beekeepers add on additional boxes throughout the summer where the bees will put nectar, they'll dry it out, and then the beekeepers will harvest that surplus honey, normally here in the fall, and then we will leave these boxes uh, the brood chamber boxes year round for the bees. These different variations. Some beekeepers will use three of these bottom boxes. Some of them, it's a little bit more advanced, but some will just use one. I'd say it's most common, especially for new beekeepers in Michigan to use two of these deeper boxes. So you might notice there's a difference in size. The bottom two boxes are what we call deeps because they're taller and these shorter ones on top are mediums. Oftentimes beekeepers use shorter boxes for honey production because honey is really heavy. Um, but there are some beekeepers who will also use the shorter style box for the brood chambers as well. All right, and then medical care. Unfortunately, there's a lot of me, um, things that we need to pay attention to and potentially medical problems for our honeybees. Our biggest issue is a parasite called the varroa mite. Here we see it on the honeybee worker. Normally, the varroa mites are going on the underside of the bees on their abdomens where we don't really see them at all, um, and these are parasites that do damage to the developing brood and to the adult bees, just by feeding on them, but especially by spreading viruses. Here we have illustration of their life cycle. At the top, we see that there's a mite on a bee. The mites are able to recognize the age of the bee and there's an age of bee that feeds the developing larvae that does that nursing care. The female mites are often on the nurse aged bees, and they will walk into the cell and go underneath the larva right before it's capped. Then that's a female mite that will do that. She will lay eggs. The first one is normally a male, and then the subsequent ones are normally females. Her offspring mate with each other. The mother mite makes a feeding spot on the developing honeybee pupae, where she and her offspring can feed. This is really where there can be a lot of exposure to different viruses by the developing bee. Then as that adult bee emerges or emerges as an adult, normally the mother mite and daughter mites that emerge as well that transfer to other bees and then can reproduce. It is not going to be a question of whether or not your colony has mites it's a question of how many overall population of mites in the colony. All of colonies in Michigan have Varroa mites. There's a couple islands in Hawaii that don't have varroa mites if you're listening from there, that's pretty awesome. But other than that, you should expect that your colony does have varroa mites and that the population will just continue to grow throughout the season if left unmanaged. Managing varroa mites is really a humongous part of beekeeping. It's one of the biggest challenges that beekeepers face. If you're trying to learn about how to manage honeybee colonies, you should also be learning about how to manage these parasites, the varroa mites. And they can do a lot of really sad damage. A lot of our losses we attribute to varroa mites and the viruses that they spread. A lot of these viruses are also spread Bee to Bee, but some of them are more virulent or harmful when they're spread by the varroa mites. Here we have a photo of a bee that has wings that didn't develop correctly. This is something that we'll see sometimes when there's really high levels of deformed wing virus in the colony, which can be spread by the varroa mites. If a bee is developing in a cell, and the varroa mites are feeding on that bee and spreading high levels of deformed wing virus. Sometimes we'll have these bees emerge with deformed wings. This virus does all kinds of other things. Even it can be in bees that have wings that look perfectly fine, but it can still make them susceptible to other issues or shorten their lifespans or have other health effects on bees. And then this is a picture of brood from a colony that had really high levels of varroa mites and viruses. If you hopefully remember what the healthy brood looked like where it's white and plump and C shaped or U shaped, and then here in this picture, we have a lot of brood that looks sunken or melted or twisted or deflated, and so this is brood that's really sick because of the high levels of viruses. This is something we're not waiting until we see these signs of um, illness or stress in the colony in order to manage the mites. Our whole goal is to keep mite levels low so that we're not getting to this spot where the brood aren't surviving, because this would be really I haven't seen the colony come back from being this sick. Um, so there's different management options for varroa mites. Some of them are non chemical options where beekeepers can do certain things in their hive to help keep the mite levels low. However, most beekeepers in Michigan, who are finding success keeping colonies healthy and alive year after year are using some kind of treatments. So these are the treatments that are approved by the Environmental Protection Agency for managing Varroa mites and so you'll see that there's several different options for beekeepers, and they all kind of have their pros and cons. There's not one that's kind of best all the time or always always easy. They all have their own drawbacks. Some of them can be used when we're collecting honey for human consumption. Some of them cannot be. Some of them are really temperature sensitive. Some of them can't be used on really small colonies, colonies small population, and then some of them have more concerns with resistance. Then some of them do kill some number of bees or brood, but an overall, very small proportion of the overall population. So there's a lot of learning you can do on varroa mite Management. A really helpful tool is the Tools for Varrao Management Guide from the Honeybee Health Coalition, and the eighth edition is available online now. The coalition is working on the ninth edition because there are some new treatments that have come out. But this is the free online resource that goes through all the different management options, including other ways to try to keep mite levels low throughout the season, and it has a lot of background information on varroa mites as well. Because this guide doesn't include some of the newer treatments, some of us wrote an online article that does cover the newer treatments that were recently released. So those are Amiflex, EZ-OX and VarroxSan, and so you'll be able to find information on the treatments not included in the eighth edition of the guide from this online resource. Alright, and then I'll just share that the Environmental Protection Agency has been trying to provide clarification to beekeepers on what can and can't be used to control varroa mites in the bee hives. So beekeepers are because anything that's used in the hive to manage mites, which are a pest is considered a pesticide, beekeepers need to be using treatments that are labeled for use for varroa mites and then applying those treatments according to the label. Then outside of varroa mites, there's other issues that these can get. The chalkbrood is a fungal disease. It's most common in the spring. European Foulbrood is a bacterial brood disease. It's really common in Michigan, unfortunately. We find it in a lot of colonies. It often clears up eventually through the summer, but it can mean that the colony is small in population or produces less honey and then sometimes we'll just see it reoccurring in a Bard year after year. American Foulbrood is a bacterial brood disease that is not very common, but is something that we take really seriously because it has a spore that can live indefinitely in the comb. Again, it's not that common to find it, but if beekeepers do they normally they have to destroy all of the comb from that hive. So there's lots of learning to do about honey bee diseases. As a brand new beekeeper, your main goal is going to be just to recognize healthy versus sick brood. And if you find what you think is sick brood, to take good photos of it, reach out to experts so that you can get some help. So it can take beekeepers a long time in order to diagnose or visually identify some of these diseases. If you can just start by recognizing healthy versus sick, that's a really good start. A really nice resource that Michigan State University developed in partnership with Texas A&M University, University of Florida, and University of Minnesota is a Diagnostic Tools for Honey Bee Diseases online learning module. So you can do this learning module. It has some quizzes to help you test your knowledge of certain bee diseases. It goes through some field diagnostic options. This tool was developed for veterinarians, so it's pretty technical, but it's also a really, really nice resource for beekeepers to learn more about honeybee brood issues and diseases. All right. Now we're going to talk through honeybee inspections. We've already established that our honey bees are animals or livestock that we're going to manage and take care of. We will do regular inspections. The frequency of these inspections depends on the time of year. Often in the spring, we're checking our colonies more frequently because they can grow so quickly that we want to make sure that they're getting what they need. Then in the summer, it might be in the spring, it would maybe be, let's say, every seven to ten days, more experienced beekeepers can go longer between inspections usually because they're able to anticipate a little bit better what the colonies will look like. In the summer it might be every couple of weeks in the fall as well. And then in the winter, we're still checking our colonies, but normally just to make sure that they still have food and we're not normally pulling up frames. So when we go through an inspection, we're going to be checking for four things. We're going to be checking that they have the right amount of food, right amount of space, that they're queenright, and that they're healthy. So we'll go through each of these. So first, we're checking for food. So we're checking, do they have pollen? Do they have nectar and honey? And then are we supplementing them if needed? So again, we should be looking for nectar or honey in the hive, and that should be in the brood boxes as well. We should also be looking for pollen that's usually around the brood nest. And then if we need to, we can feed supplemental feed. So we can feed sugar syrup in place of nectar, and then there are protein supplements that we can give some of them have pollen that's been irradiated, some of them just have different proteins and blends of vitamins and minerals so we can feed them. That's an option as well. Also in Michigan, our bees tend to do pretty well in terms of bringing in pollen. There's other parts of the country where they have to do a lot more supplemental feeding with protein patties because they don't have as much pollen. But in most parts of Michigan, our bees do pretty well in terms of bringing in pollen. Alright. Next, we're going to make sure that our bees have the appropriate amount of space. So here you can see in this hive, the bees probably needed some more space. It looks like the bees are kind of just boiling over. They maybe didn't have enough room. Smaller colonies. So if you get a colony to start, they normally do better in a smaller space. That's why we start them off with a smaller space, and then we just add on boxes as the bees need more space for that brood nest to expand and for the bees to put in nectar for surplus honey. So again, we're really trying to think about the brood chamber boxes and the honey super boxes differently, the brood chamber being for the colony year round, and then the honey super being for honey production for human consumption. And so this is also important in terms of how long we keep our comb around for. The comb that's used in the broods year round may have more disease and pesticide buildup, especially because it has the pollen in it, whereas the boxes and the honey supers are just really used for storing nectar and honey. And so those combs don't need to be replaced quite as frequently. There's also kind of human health concerns. About reasons to keep these boxes separate. So, again, the boxes that are honey supers for collecting circus nectar, and then honey are really, you know, we want to make sure that that honey is really clean if we're going to be feeding it to humans. The brood chamber boxes may be exposed to different things. So for example, certain varroa mite treatments that aren't approved when the honey supers are on. It's not super common for small scale beekeepers, but sometimes they'll treat with antibiotics to deal with the bacterial brood disease, and those antibiotics can't be applied when we're collecting honey for humans. And then sometimes the brood boxes that are there year round get exposed to other things like mold or sometimes even mice, so we really want to keep those boxes separate. Alright, another thing that we're checking for when we're doing our normal colony inspections is that the colony is queenright. And even though we love seeing our queen, normally, what we're going to do in an inspection is just look for eggs. So, there's sometimes more than 50,000 bees in a hive, and so trying to find that queen can be pretty disruptive to a colony. So normally, what we're going to do is just look in that brood nest area and try to find eggs. And if we see eggs like this, then we know the queen's there. If you remember from earlier, eggs are eggs for three days. So if we see eggs like this, then we can feel confident that the eggs that the queen's been there within the last three days or so. And so you might wonder, well, why wouldn't you have a queen? What could be going? Sometimes the colony's raise queens, there's three main situations. So one is swarming. We think of our honeybee colonies as superorganism. The way that the super organism reproduces isn't just on the level of the queen laying eggs, it's also on the level of the colony dividing itself. So the colonies do this by swarming. It's really common, especially in the spring for colonies that overwinter, that they will want to swarm as a way to reproduce. Oftentimes in the spring, the queen that survived the winter with the bees will leave the hive and they will leave behind some queens that are developing. But the queen leaves the hive with a portion of the bees, for a third to half of the bees, and they will initially hang out close to the hive in a swarm and then move into a permanent hive location, like some kind of cavity. Um, but then another thing that can happen is that these colonies can swarm just if they don't have enough space in the hive. So if they don't have enough empty drawn comb for the queen to lay eggs and for the incoming nectar. Colonies can also raise new queens if they are superseding. And so this is when the colony decides that the queen is failing or if she's not giving enough of those pheromones, they will raise queens and eventually one queen will replace that older queen, usually. And then sometimes they will sometimes the older queen stays alive and there's two queens in the colony, but that's maybe not super common. Then the final situation is that sometimes the queen dies unexpectedly or is removed. And in that case, the workers recognize that there aren't queen pheromones in the hive and they will select some of the young female larvae to feed that royal jelly to raise a replacement queen. So here we have just a picture of the queen's cells. So on the right, this is a sealed queen cell, so this is where there's a honey bee queen pupae developing inside. And then on the left, we have an emerged queen cell. So the queen used her mouth parts to open up the bottom of that cell. Normally, it's the first or often it's the first queen who emerges, who gets to be queen. So if the colony, when they're raising queens can sometimes raise a dozen or more queens, one, the first one out will often go and mark the other queen cells and and the workers will help destroy those queens and queen cells. During a swarm, this is what a swarm can look like. Usually, it's the queen with a huge portion of the bees in the colony and they will congregate close to the hive in the swarm formation while bees look for a permanent hive location. The scout bees will try to find some kind of cavity. They will do their waggle dance to communicate the direction and distance to the bees. And then once enough of the bees are doing the waggle dance to the same location, the swarm will move on. So swarms are pretty cool. They tend to be pretty docile. They're fun to see. But we normally as beekeepers are trying to deter swarming because it means that A, we have unmanaged colonies out in the environment. One thing that can happen unfortunately is, you know, maybe a swarm doesn't make its way into a tree cavity, maybe it finds the siding of someone's home instead, and that can be pretty expensive for someone to have to remove. And then we also have issues or potential issues where if we have unmanaged colonies, then maybe they're spreading diseases and parasites to the colonies that we have managed. So just some more fun photos of swarms. So again, the swarming is just the natural way that our colonies want to reproduce. They have a really strong biological urge to swarm. They will swarm also if there's not enough drawn empty comb for queen to lay or for the bees to store nectar. It depends on the weather and it changes from year to year. Some years we see more swarms than others. It often coincides with the onset of a strong nectar flow, so there's a lot of nectar coming into the hives. And then some colonies have genetics where they're more prone to swarming than others. So in order to deter swarms, beekeepers often split surviving colonies in the spring. So for example, if we have two colonies that make it through the winter, we might split each of those colonies so that the next year in the spring. And so those colonies are smaller in population, that can help deter some of the swarming. Other queen issues that I'll mention real quickly, just so you know that they can come up in your beekeeping and you kind of have a little bit of context as you're learning more. One is called laying workers, and this is something that can happen if the colony has been queenless for a period of time. For example, maybe something happened to the queen, the bees raise a new queen and maybe she goes on mating flights and just doesn't come back from her mating fights. At that point, the colony wouldn't have any way to raise a new queen because there's no young female larvae in the hive. So in the absence of the queens phermones and the brood phermones, some of the workers ovaries activate and they can lay eggs. But since workers can't mate, they can only lay unfertilized eggs. You might remember from earlier that unfertilized eggs develop into drones. Um so here's a picture of brood laid by laying workers. Some of the telltale signs of laying workers are multiple eggs per cell. You might see some of the cells have three or more eggs in them. Sometimes laying workers will lay eggs on the sides of cells instead of on the back and the foundation. And then the brood here that's developing these larvae are all kind of taking up a little bit too much space. So this is drone brood here that's developing and the smaller cell that's normally where workers develop. And so for laying workers, there's different strategies, but you can't normally just give that colony a queen because the laying workers hive is unlikely to accept a new queen. Normally, with especially small scale or beginning beekeepers, we'll suggest a combination, so you can combine it with a queenright colony. This is one reason why we really suggest starting with two or three colonies is because you have more options for troubleshooting. Alright, another thing that can happen is a drone layer queen. And so this is where a queen is laying unfertilized eggs, where we expect her to be laying fertilized eggs. It can happen if it's a new queen who just wasn't properly mated to begin with, or it can happen with an old queen who is starting to run out of sperm in her spermathica. And this is a situation where the beekeeper can remove and replace the queen. Sometimes the bees will supersede her, but sometimes they won't necessarily. And this is a place where the beekeeper can intervene and replace the queen. Another resource for you, particularly on Queens is called Help I Need a Queen by Dr. Megan Milbrath who works here at Michigan State University as well. One thing that's really nice about this guide is that it goes through the timeline of how long it takes for a queen to develop, go on mating flights, and then when you'd expect to find eggs in the hive. This is another reason why as you're inspecting your colonies, it's really best practice to always take notes so you know when, you know, with each inspection, did you see eggs? Did the colony have enough food? Did it have enough space, and then was it healthy? Alright, so that brings us to checking for health. So we're looking for three things. We're looking for that the brood is healthy and the bees are healthy. And then we're monitoring for varroa mites to make sure that those levels are low and that we're managing those as needed. So there's different ways we can monitor for varroa mites. We're normally going to recommend the alcohol wash test because it's the most accurate, and this is where you take a sample of 300 bees. You shake them in isocop alcohol to dislodge the vomites and you pour the alcohol out through a sieve so that the varroa mites come out with alcohol and separate them from the bees, and then you have a sample or you are able to figure out how many mites per there are in your sample of 300 bees. It does take some practice. Normally, especially with new beekeepers, we'll suggest monitoring your colonies for varroa mites at least once per month throughout the beekeeping season. It is important to note that the mite levels between colonies can really vary even if the colonies are in the exact same yard and the management is the same. It's good to monitor your colonies, each of them. Again, normally recommend starting with two or three colonies. You just start with one colony, you're not going to have the troubleshooting options. If you try to start with more than three colonies, you might find yourself quickly over your head since there's a lot of learning to do. But the number of colonies is dynamic. If the colonies are surviving, you may split them. You can either expand the number of colonies you manage or a lot of beekeepers will sell colonies to other beekeepers in the spring. And then there's also loss to or combination. So earlier we talked if there's laying workers, you might be combining your colonies. This is just to say that the number of colonies you may have may change throughout the season or from year to year. You normally aren't going to be able to maintain a very specific set number. It's also really helpful to have extra beekeeping equipment on hand in case you need to make a split in order to deter swarming. Honeybees can live through really harsh cold winters if they're healthy. Unfortunately, we lose large numbers of our honeybee colonies every year, especially in the winter, but that we believe is mostly due to the varroa mites and the viruses they spread. Those mites and the viruses tend to be highest or peak in the fall right when our winter bees are developing. If our colony goes into winter not in good health, it can be much harder for it to survive the winter. But there are many places colder than here where honeybees do survive. They just need to be healthy and have enough honey. All right. So a lot of people really enjoy learning about beekeeping. I'll just mention a few of my favorite things here. So the bees in these photos are giving off pheromones and they're giving off different pheromones. The ones on the left are giving off Nasonov which is an orientation pheromone, and the one on the right is giving off alarm pheromones. So there's her stingers out, and then there's a little drop with venom on that singer. So the Nasonov orientation pheromones is really lemony. It's not defensive. A lot of beekeepers can smell it. Then they over on the right is more defensive behavior. It normally causes a chain reaction where other bees in the hive will also start to give off alarm pheromones, which can elicit stinging. This is why beekeepers use smoke to mask those alarm pheromones. We can also read their behavior. Sometimes we see signs that the bees are getting a little bit defensive or trending that way. So this picture is really adorable where bees are looking up at the beekeeper, but that can be one of the first signs of defensive behavior. So the beekeeper can just normally in this situation, use a couple puffs of smoke, and the bees will disperse. And yeah, there's other kinds of ways we can read those behaviors. Here we have pictures of brood and the queen because the brood give off different pheromones, and so does the queen. So there's a lot of chemical signals going on inside the hive. Normally we're trying to work with their natural instincts. If you want to be good at beekeeping, what you should really focus on a lot is the honeybee biology. If you can understand what the bees are trying to do, then that can make it much easier for you to understand how to manage the bees. The colony's goal really is to get big enough in population, get enough food to survive the winter and then to reproduce in the spring. If you haven't started beekeeping yet and you want to think about, if it's a good fit for you, we have a free online class that's called Is beekeeping right for me. And this covers many of the considerations that beekeepers told us that they wish they would have known before getting started. So the things it covers are, you know, an introduction to the honeybee how to help bees. I think a lot of people are interested in beekeeping because they hear about bees and they want to do something to help them. And oftentimes, if we're really focusing on helping bees, we're going to think a lot about the wild species of bees and conservation efforts. So there's a lot of options in there for people to, you know, consider planting for bees or supporting them that way. There's the needs of beekeeping, which include physical demands, time demands. There's testimonials and then also from beekeepers in the course and then also information on financial costs. And then find that regardless of whether people decide that the beekeeping is right for them, we invite them to make a pledge to help pollinators. The course covers lifting. I think a lot of people underestimate how much lifting there is in beekeeping. Again, bees bring propolis or resins back to the hive that we call propolis. And so these boxes are sticking together. Honey can be really heavy to lift and sometimes the lifting positions can be awkward with a honey bee hive. Then this is done in suits and gloves that sometimes can interfere with the range of motion and dexterity. The veils can restrict vision at some points. The boxes can be hard to lift once they're full of honey and higher up. There's a lot of beekeepers that have back issues over time. So it's really something to think about, especially because there's these sometimes awkward twisting motions. But there are ways that beekeeping can be more accessible or you can make accommodations if you're not able to lift. One great way is just to have another beekeeper help you so that at least two people are lifting boxes. There are some alternative hivestyles that don't require as much lifting. However, they can be more challenging to get bees to survive in Michigan. So just a little bit more advanced. We talk a lot about how much time it takes to keep bees. The actual inspections don't need to take that long and they don't need to be done that often. I think the bigger part time demand is just how much learning there is about beekeeping. There's also equipment prep. There's different associations and trade journals, so lots of learning opportunities, but it does take a long time. So we have some testimonials and the course from real beekeepers, quotes that we use that they shared with us about their experience getting started. And then we cover a little bit of the cost too. Normally, it can vary depending on how you start with bees. A lot of times beekeepers are starting with package colonies or nucleus colonies that they're buying from other beekeepers. There's the hive equipment, which you can buy unassembled or assembled, painted or unpainted. There's personal protection equipment or PPE. There's tools like your hive tool and smoker. There's feed, like sugar syrup and protein patties. There's medication like varroa mite treatments, there's honey processing equipment. Normally, you you're looking at over $1,000 or more just to get started. Alright. And then, as I mentioned, the is beekeeping right for me, online course covers how people can help bees, and the main way is planting flowers, so getting more floral resources in the landscape, more nesting sites for our wild spices of bees and keeping those flowers clean and free of pesticides that can harm bees. We also have another online course that's really about just supporting pollinators in general in Michigan, and that's called Pollinator Champions, the free online course that covers the bees in Michigan, how the issues they're facing and how people can help. All right. If you at this point are thinking you want to get started, normally our best recommendation for you is going to be that you don't start by buying bees. Start by buying a beekeeping suit, join a beekeeping club or association and get some in hive experience before you actually purchase bees. That might be through your beekeeping club. You might take a beekeeping class or you might find someone who's willing to mentor you. There's about 30 beekeeping clubs in Michigan. You can find them on the Michigan Beekeepers Association's website, which is michigan bees.org, and the list of different clubs in Michigan. There's a lot of beekeeping conferences or schools that happen throughout each year. So this is an example of the beekeeping conferences in schools that happened this year. So most of them have already taken place, but the Michigan Beekeepers Association spring conference is happening this Saturday, March 1 on campus in East Lansing, and then the Southeastern Michigan Beekeepers Association Spring conference is happening on Saturday, March 15. And then Michigan State University does a lot to try to help beekeepers. So throughout the beekeeping season, we have monthly webinars where we answer questions from beekeepers and the registration is open for all of those webinars this year, we post the recordings online to our Michigan State University Extension website and to our YouTube channel. All right, so I'll cover some additional resources. We'll do surveys, and then I'll answer your questions. So Michigan State University Extension's website is canr.msu.edu/bees. And so this is where you'll find our Extension materials related to bees and beekeeping. On the site, there's a button to sign up for our newsletter, so you can sign up for the beekeeping and pollinators email digest that normally goes out a couple of times per month, and it has upcoming events and recent articles. So this is really our best way to communicate with you is by signing up through this newsletter. There's also the Ask Extension form. So if you have beekeeping questions or, you know, maybe see something in your hive and you're not sure what's going on. The best way for you to ask a question is through the Ask Extension form. You can type out your question and then you can also attach photos. Especially if you have a weird brood issue or something, it really helps us to be able to see your photos. Then it has a donate button as well if you want to support our work. Further down on the page, it has, you know, different topic areas like beekeeping and gardening for pollinators. And then it also sorts information by articles, online courses, upcoming events, and videos. Another website that we have is pollinators .msu.edu that has a lot of information, especially on planting for pollinators. And then, again, that Is Beekeeping Right for Me? Online horse is a great place to really think through if this is a good fit for you and some of the different considerations. Getting started with beekeeping in Michigan, is an online article where we compile a lot of resources for beekeepers. So this is a good place if you're getting started or if you are just not really connected well as a beekeeper with the different resources here in our state. And then we compile a lot of other resources in this online article, article, sorry, apiculture programs and resources from Michigan State University Extension. This covers everything from different programs to regulations for beekeepers and other resources for them. And then I'll also just share that our MSU Extension food safety educators have been doing some special classes on honey and maple syrup. And so this might be of interest to people who are producing honey. So they have them scheduled through March 11, 2025, but they are scheduling additional sessions throughout the year. Honey and maple syrup on Michigan are exempt from cottage food laws, so the policies and laws around them are different than other food products. And then we're on Facebook. Our MSU beekeeping Facebook page has a lot of upcoming opportunities and resources for beekeepers. Then Michigan Pollinator Initiative has things about pollinators in general. Right. With that, there's a lot of funding that makes our work possible, especially from Michigan Department of Agriculture Rural Development and from USDA, the United States Department of Agriculture. Yeah, this is a program offered by Michigan State University Extension. I'm Ana heck. I'm an apiculture extension educator at Michigan State University. You have the heaping questions, you can submit them to ask Extension.