A Day with the Bees

 A day with the bees is always a great day. On Saturday, 1 May 2010, the Blount County Beekeeper’s Association conducted their annual Field Day. For those of you who have no clue what a beekeeper’s field day is, I’ll go ahead and break it down for you.


The annual field day is the third step in training for new beekeepers. The first step was a two day “short course” designed to give an overview and orientation to beekeeping. The second step is a wooden ware class to get hands on training on how to build the hive boxes (bodies and supers) as well as assembling frames and installing the wax foundation.

The third step is where we get hands on experience in working with the hives and the bees. We had several veteran beekeepers who dedicated their time to teach us all about the bees and hives. A bunch of us new beekeepers got the opportunity to open a variety of different hives and see these marvelous creatures in action.

After listening to some great guest speakers and reading all about bees, it was great to get into the hives and apply these lessons to learning firsthand how they work their magic.

We opened a nucleus (nuc) hive. A nuc is a brand new hive beginning with a new queen and typically only has five frames of wax foundation. A normal hive body will have either 9 or 10 frames.

We opened established hived and hives that already had the honey supers placed on them. We even opened a hive that was created from a collected swarm.

We learned queen identification and how to tell if the queen is actively lying. This is done by examining the frames and looking very close for new eggs and larvae. We learned how to identify capped brood which is the final stage in the 21-day development of a new worker bee. We learned how to spot the difference between a worker bee cell and a drone cell.

We witnessed bees entering the hives loaded with pollen and how they pack the honey into the cells for storage. We saw how the bees draw out the honeycomb buy creating wax for egg development and honey storage. We also saw examples of new queen cells being developed by a colony of bees.



This type of hands on training was extremely beneficial for all of us new beekeepers. My learning beginner training continues for the next two years with by bee mentor, Dale. I am learning so much about bees and their importance in our food supply.



Anyone who may be interested in getting started in beekeeping can certainly ask me all the questions you desire. My first advised is to find a local beekeeping association and attend your first meeting. Get to know some of the local beekeepers in your area. If you do not have a local association or know of any beekeepers, look around in some of your local markets. Many beekeepers will sell their local honey. You may even see signs that say “local honey for sale”. Contact them and let them you are interested in beekeeping.



I will also recommend our beekeeper’s association to anyone in our area of East Tennessee. Here a link to the Association’s website. http://blountbees.wordpress.com/

Stay tuned for additional updates about our beekeeping experiences.