What is successful beekeeping?
Beekeeping is safely managing honey bee colonies so that colonies are healthy and productive. Beekeeping begins with the beekeeper and the other nearby people and animals staying safe. Beekeeping can be risky, but that risk can be managed through a combination of education, safe practices, and protective equipment.
Successful beekeeping requires healthy bees. These days, healthy bees almost always require beekeeper interventions and management. Think of beekeeping like managing a cattle ranch. A successful rancher cannot assume that her cattle herd is healthy by merely watching them grazing from a distance. Not only must she ensure they have adequate feed and water available every day, but she must also check them for signs of disease and treat their ailments if necessary. The same is true in beekeeping.
Choose a beehive management strategy that works for you
We keep bees, because doing so can provide us with benefits. For most of us, the primary benefit is honey, but it could also be pollination or environmental restoration. Productive colonies do provide us with lots of good things. To make the most out of our beekeeping, we should be clear about which of these benefits matter the most to us and tailor our management strategy towards that end. Managing bees for maximum honey production requires different tactics than managing bees for pollination.
For your first beekeeping season, however, this does not matter. All the good tactics are the same at the beginning. Your only goal for your first year with bees should be to keep your colonies healthy until the following Spring. Beekeepers call this successfully overwintering.
Successfully overwintering a colony of bees outside in a wooden box has always been a challenge in the US anywhere with a real winter. Even in central Florida, which has no real winter, there is a long dearth of nectar resources, requiring beekeepers to feed their bees during this time. Prior to the late 1980s, the best management strategy for overwintering successfully was to ensure that the bees had both adequate food and shelter. The most important questions involved queen health, how much honey to leave the bees and how many brood boxes to use in the hive.
Beehive pests make overwintering hard
Since then, however, successfully overwintering has become significantly more difficult. This is largely due to a few invasive pests from overseas. The worst of these, by far, is the varroa destructor mite. This parasitic mite, left untreated, can easily kill even the most well-fed and well-insulated honey bee colony. Honeybee colony management these days requires diligent attention to these pests.
This cannot be overemphasized, because the effect of varroa is often not seen in uninspected colonies until that colony is near collapse. In our region, varroa effects often take until the Fall or even sometimes longer than one season to become apparent with casual observation. Thankfully, it is currently easier than at any time since the appearance of varroa in the late 1980s to monitor and control these parasites.