Back at my hometown in East Aurora NY during the covid pandemic, I decided that I was going to pick up a brand-new hobby that not too many people do, beekeeping. I signed up for an apprenticeship and picked up a book and decided to give it a go, and it resulted in something I love doing to this day. When coming to Penn State, I knew I wanted to continue my passion throughout college and decided to look into the Penn State Beekeeping Club. This past Tuesday, I was given the opportunity to head down to the hives with the club to perform an inspection, leading to a whole lot of fun.
Doing inspections in hives are quite simple, before you go into the hive you have to use a device called a smoker, which does exactly what it sounds like. The smoker allows you to mask the pheromones bees use to communicate with each other, essentially making it so they don’t go into an instant panic and become defensive. From here it’s pretty easy, the beehive is separated into separate boxes full of frames used to store whatever the bees wish. These boxes, depending on what the bees are storing in them, can weigh up to 50 pounds, making them a two-man job to peacefully get them off the hive. After the heavy lifting is done, we take the frames out from each box and inspect them in order to see if there are any irregularities such as egg placement and mite inspections.
This week, the hive itself to be in a pretty good condition after they had recently treated it for a mite problem. Although many people are terrified of bees, most people don’t realize how calm they often are. Honeybees will only sting if you are treating the hive poorly in self-defense, however, treat them kindly and you have nothing to worry about. As you can tell from the photos above, a majority of us were in wearing typical pants and only had protection over our upper body and head, one of the members doesn’t even wear gloves. Bees are often feared off, but when you take a moment to calm yourself down and take a look into what they are doing, an entire world appears, bringing along curious thoughts and a wanting to know more about our fuzzy friends.
As someone who always flinches and runs away when a bee comes near me your piece is very fascinating. Bees are really important little creatures and after hearing that they are usually very calm, I’ll try to be less scared of them. I think it’s so fascinating that you do this and can’t wait to hear more about it!!!
This is an awesome account of your experience and history with your hobby! I am very interested in the science and fun behind bees which you definitely explained well. I do not know that much about beekeeping, but I am interested to learn more.