For thousands of years, man has been interacting with honeybees and making use of the honey, the larvae and the beeswax. Making a living solely from beekeeping can be done, but it requires the care and maintenance of lots of large beekeeping hives. Most beekeepers have therefore kept honeybees along with other forms of making a living. Whilst you still can make a living through commercial beekeeping, most beekeepers are hobbyists who simply enjoy working with such amazing insects.

Honeybee Biology

Honeybees are social insects, who live in groups and have very specific tasks according to their place in the social hierarchy. They cooperate in maintaining their beehive and caring for their young. In order to maintain their social hierarchy, honeybees have different “castes” that they are born into.

Drone Bees

The drones are the male bees that fly from the beekeeping hive and mate in the air with queens of other colonies and other hives. A colony may have anything up to 500 drones.

Queen Bees

There is only one queen per beekeeping hive and per colony. The queen is a fully fertile female and her job is to produce eggs and affect the behaviour of the colony by producing pheromones (chemicals) that regulate and instruct the other bees of the hive. At the larvae stage a queen is exactly the same as a worker, but is fed a special food called “royal jelly”, which develops them into a queen. Therefore, if a queen dies or is lost, workers will select another larvae to feed royal jelly and hence the queen is replaced.

Worker Bees

The worker bee is an underdeveloped female that cannot reproduce and each beekeeping hive may have a colony of 2 to 6 thousand workers. As their name suggests, they do the bulk of the work around the hive and go foraging for food and generally take care of the bee colony. They are by far the biggest caste in the colony.