Hi,
I'm the hobby kind.  With two hives, since I gave my third away to a
friend.  Live in Florida, and got -much to my surprise- about a hundred
pounds of honey from the first harvest of the year.  I'm in my second
year as a beekeeper, and I'm having a blast.  Reading and learning and
observing my bees have been a most rewarding pastime.

It took me some time to learn that the bees know more about beekeeping
than I do, and actually leaving them alone as much as possible have been
a problem.  I always want to inspect too much.  Now I look in the honey
supers to see when to harvest, and I look in the topmost brood box only
to check for brood pattern, presence of eggs, absence of disease, and
such.  And if everything is OK, I leave the bottom brood boxes alone.

However, living in a residential neighborhood, swarms are a serious
problem, I had one and a half this spring and my neighbors were not
pleased.  Next spring I will do whatever it takes to prevent swarms.  I
have one neighbor with young kids and a swimming pool, and having her
knock on my door, looking rather sternly at me and informing me that my
bees were in her backyard and would I please remove them before any of
her kids got killed by thousands of bee stings.  It turned out that "the
swarm" was about a hundred bees clustering on a branch about 15 feet
up.  Probably a bunch of drones, but who knows.  When I came back to
catch them later that afternoon, they were all gone.  She was pleased
about that, but still not happy about having 120,000 bees right across
the back fence.  Of course I didn't give her the actual number.

My one and a half real swarms didn't affect her.  They settled across
the fence in Mr. Wilson's orange tree.  He tried to be cool about it,
since he had encouraged my beekeeping adventure by telling me how good
it would be for his tree, and how - when he was young - he used to get
comb honey from an uncle of his every spring back "up north", but he was
not real sure about the swarm and kept his distance from it.  The swarm
settled in two places.  I thought it was two swarms.  I got them both,
and put them in hive boxes.  The main swarm did really well and is now
at my friends house, the other - the half swarm - was not queen right
and died out.  Mainly because I didn't want four hives and I didn't
provide a frame with eggs.  I got a laying worker so now I know what
that looks like.  Four eggs in one cell, jeez - what was she thinking :)

Extracting is a Chinese fire drill.  Get the bees off the frames with a
fume board, except they will not all go so a bee brush is needed to
provide some incentive, lift the super down on my little red wagon so I
can drag it to my back porch, persuade a few more bees to let me have
the frames alone, carry the super into the kitchen without letting any
bees inside the house...  And I haven't really started yet.  I have
three supers on each hive and I can pull a maximum of two at a time.
Wrapped in some old bedding to keep the bees out.  Did you know they can
smell honey from about a million yards away?  The bedding really isn't
fooling them.  It's good my wife likes the honey because there certainly
is a lot of disbelieving head shaking from her during this procedure.

But hey, I'm having fun, and my allergies are better - which is why I
started with all this in the first place - and I'm learning new stuff.
I'm still working full time as a network engineer/sysadmin and
beekeeping is a very relaxing hobby.  It puts me back in touch with the
rhythm of life, the cycles of the year, and reminds me that we are not
alone on this planet and that bees are doing an incredibly important
job.  Far more important than the one I do every day.

It's a reality check I need when things get out of whack.

Otto

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