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Beekeeper Supplies – Find Out What Beginners Need To Get Started!
By Jack Pomare
Proper beekeeper supplies are used in order to make the job of beekeeping safer and easier for the beekeeper. Like any tradesman or professional, it is essential that even a hobbyist beekeeper make available to him the proper beekeeper supplies, their “tools of the trade”, as the saying goes.
The activity of beekeeping is not without its own risks or rewards for that matter, therefore using the proper beekeeper supplies will ensure that you “the beekeeper” be rewarded and the risks are minimized. The use of the right equipment starts with the protective beekeeping suit. A light colored full length; beekeeping suit is an essential part of a beekeeper’s protection.
The beekeeping suit when combined with protective gloves hat and veil, are all used for a beekeepers protection. Another main component of beekeeper supplies used by the beekeeper is the smoker, this is used to calm the bees down so that a beekeeper can work closely with a bee colony.
The “smoker”, a device that puffs out smoke, the smoker uses a variety of fuels such as corrugated cardboard, Twine, wood and hessian to create the smoke. It calms the bees down making it easier to work with them. The smoke also triggers a response to a possible fire threat to the hive colony.
Since the colony is confused this gives the beekeeper an opportunity to open up the hive and work with the colony. The largest component for beekeeping is the hive itself. A Beekeeper uses artificial housing to keep the bee colony in. In olden days people used straw hives called skeps to house bee colonies. Nowadays the type of beehive commonly used in the United States is the Langstroth hive.
The hive essentially becomes a place for a bee colony to lay eggs, make honey and a place to shelter from the elements. When the bees are restricted to the hive due to weather conditions, a feeder is used so a beekeeper can feed their bees.
Different feeders are available to a beekeeper to use, such as top-hive, pail or division boards are available for feeding bees. The inside feeders such as hive-top, pail or division boards are used during the wintertime. While an “Entrance feeder” can be used to feed the honeybees during the summertime. Honeybees are more active during the summertime and that is why this type of feeder is used.
Working bees are great at finding food for themselves and the colony in all seasons. However some beekeepers provide them with sugar syrup as an addition to help supplement the hive. This is excellent for the bees just in case it becomes difficult for bees to find food. This way the bees won’t starve and it can also trigger the process of laying eggs.
In order to make it easier for bees to make honey, a man made comb is used for bees to make honey within. It also makes it easier when harvesting from this wax foundation. The wax foundation is a thin sheet of wax over a hexagonal cell based pattern. This is the foundation that the honeybees will use to make honey in. This also helps the bees own energy reserves as they don’t need to use as much of there own time and energy on making their own combs from scratch. When harvesting your honey a beekeeper uses an extractor to get the honey out of the combs.
An extractor, is essentially a centrifuge, that the combs from the hive are placed into, and then spun around where the force of the centrifugal effect draws the honey to the side of the extractor. Now all that’s left to do is get the honey from the extractor and into bottles. There is a tap at the bottom of the extractor to conveniently remove the honey.