Many events collectively are greatly impacting urban beekeeping, sometimes referred to as residential beekeeping. The beekeeping world is undergoing profound changes. The survival of honey bees is threatened by pesticides, parasites, predators, and a multitude of microorganisms. Almost everyone now recognizes that bees are needed to pollinate agricultural crops that provide one-third of the food that we need to survive. Public interest in helping bees survive is greater than ever. Financial support for research to solve these threats to bees is at an all-time high. Interest in hobby beekeeping is soaring beyond expectation. Beekeeping clubs are flourishing in response to this surge of interest in beekeeping. It is now a badge of honor to be a hobby beekeeper. Dramatic changes in beekeeping are underway.
Rooftop hives are popular for city beekeepers.
Let’s pause a moment to define an urban environment as it relates to further discussion. Urban environments for beekeeping vary greatly. You may live in the heart of New York City, San Francisco, or another very large city where residential lots are small and vegetation is limited. Or you may be located in a city where lot sizes are large, vegetation is extensive, and open countryside is within foraging range of your bees. My comments hereafter are more applicable to larger cities.
There is an unrecognized threat to hobby beekeeping that must be taken seriously if hobby beekeeping is to thrive in urban environments. Surprisingly, this threat is inadvertently created by hobby beekeepers as they pursue their hobby to extreme levels of success. So what is this threat? The answer is simple. There are, or soon could be, too many bee colonies to survive and thrive in many urban environments.
The typical hobbyist starts with one or two hives. Owing to his or her inexperience in management practices, these colonies frequently swarm in the spring. The beekeeper captures the swarms and starts new colonies in his or her excitement to have more fun and to nourish expectations of harvesting more honey. The novice beekeeper assumes that two colonies will produce twice as much honey as one. There is also a tendency equate the number of hives a beekeeper owns with his or her status as a beekeeper.
Hobby beekeepers proudly share their successes and the amount of honey they harvest. When their production greatly exceeds what they can consume at home, or give as gifts, they begin to think about selling their surplus honey as a means of covering their expenses for hive equipment and beekeeping tools. This can lead them into time-consuming marketing situations that may not be profitable. The end result is often that their great enthusiasm frequently leads them to contribute to the serious problem of overpopulating the area with bees.
Just like other animals, honey bees need a balanced diet of high-quality food. Nectar provides carbohydrates, and pollen supplies protein, fats, and minerals. Many urbanites are planting bee-friendly trees, shrubs, and flowers in an effort to help bees, but open space is limited. Increasing populations of bees can easily “overgraze” the resources. After the high-quality nectar and pollen sources are depleted, bees will collect lower-quality food that compromises their welfare. Excessive competition for limited nectar and pollen sources also threatens hundreds of native bee species, such as bumble bees, that have similar dietary requirements.
Rooftop colonies in Brooklyn, New York.
The yield of honey per colony is declining significantly in urban environments. These declines leave no doubt that overpopulation of bees in urban settings is the primary cause. Few beekeepers are aware that each bee colony consumes at least 100 pounds (45 kg) of honey annually, made from approximately 200 pounds (91 kg) of nectar! When nectar is abundant and there is good weather for foraging, a typical healthy colony has the potential to produce more than 100 pounds (45 kg) of harvestable honey per year. This is far more than typical hobby beekeepers are harvesting these days. It should be obvious that hobby beekeepers are keeping too many colonies in the typical urban environment. An exception is smaller cities where bees can forage several miles from their hives, potentially reaching rewarding vegetation outside the urban environment.
The availability of sufficient pollen is even more critical in urban environments. Colonies consume an estimated 50 pounds (23 kg) of pollen a year. When competition for limited pollen resources becomes critical, this adversely affects the health and reproduction of colonies. Sometimes “pollen-hungry” foraging bees will collect inferior pollens or even collect sawdust or other nonnutritious materials that are similar to pollen.
How Many Hives Should an Urban Beekeeper Have?
I am now going to tread bravely on sacred beekeeping ground by proposing a radical change to beekeeping in urban environments. It is time to recognize the realities of the urban environment and make appropriate changes in beekeeping practices. One colony normally would produce enough honey for a hungry family with some to spare for friends and neighbors. A second five-frame “nucleus” colony would be helpful to support the primary colony in case the primary queen needs to be replaced occasionally by a young queen. Having five colonies does not provide five times as much fun as having one colony. A surplus of colonies is just more work and an unnecessary expense, and you are robbing honey from other beekeepers in your area, which extends at least a mile in all directions from your hives. As an urban beekeeper, your mantra should be “fewer hives and more fun.”
How Much Honey Should You Eat?
Excess sugar consumption is associated with obesity, type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, tooth decay, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, and much more. The average person consumes more than twice the sugar found in a healthy diet. Adding honey can make the problem worse, unless you reduce an equivalent amount of sugar from other sources.
How often do you think this strategy is successful? Many people believe that sugars in honey are more nutritious and healthy than other sugars in our diets. The truth is that all of these sugars end up being metabolized the same way in our bodies. Labeling honey as a natural, organic, or non-GMO product doesn’t change its nutritional status. Ordinary table sugar (sucrose) is a highly refined natural product. Eating too much honey and/or table sugar yields the same unhealthy results. One healthy colony, managed properly in average conditions, should produce much more honey than a typical family should consume if they want to have a healthy diet. Honey should be considered as a treat, not a staple, in our diets.
A beekeeping shop in a Greek city features local organic honey and other products for honey bee enthusiasts.
How to Increase Harvestable Honey
A typical colony consumes 30 to 60 pounds (approximately 14 to 27 kg) of honey during the winter months, depending upon the area. What if you could harvest this honey instead of leaving it for bees to consume? There is no guarantee that your colony will survive the winter, even if it has abundant food stores, including your harvestable honey. The following proposed management scheme would eliminate the risks of overwintering and enable you to harvest most of the honey that the bees would have consumed.
In late summer or early fall, confine the queen in a cage held in the middle of the brood chamber approximately twenty-three days before the anticipated end of the honey flow. During this time, all of the brood will emerge, and the beneficial queen pheromones will still be produced. Now, take your hive to your friend’s apiary and transfer all of your bees to another hive or hives. This apiary should be located at least three miles from your apiary. Releasing your bees at shorter distances will enable some of the bees to return home.
Make the transfer by shaking and brushing all of your bees into one or more hives. Your friend should be appreciative because populous colonies will survive the winter better than weak colonies. Now you can harvest all of your honey except for several brood frames that contain pollen and some honey. Put these in your freezer so you can use them next spring when you start a new colony. The remainder of the frames can be stored as usual during the winter.
Starting a New Colony in Spring
There are several options for starting a new colony in spring. You can attempt to lure a swarm to your used hive. Attractive odors from the old brood chamber, combined with the addition of one brood comb, will often attract a swarm. You can significantly increase the chances of luring a swarm if you also use swarm-attractant pheromones that are available commercially. If you fail to attract a swarm during the spring “swarm season,” there are several other options.
Maybe you have a friend whose colonies are very populous, perhaps even producing swarm cells during swarming preparation. Taking your friend’s “surplus” bees during swarm season would help prevent swarming. Timing is important, so here is a tip: the best time to start this procedure is about a week or two after the first drone cells are capped. This happens in early spring, several weeks before swarm season starts.
Transfer the queen and approximately half of the bees from your friend’s hive onto your combs. Leave the best queen cell and destroy the others so the donor colony will get a new queen without the risk of swarming. If you don’t take the old queen, and there are queen cells available, then transfer several queen cells to your colony or introduce a new queen that you purchased. You could also borrow a frame of young brood or swap your empty brood comb for your friend’s frame of young brood, which would enable your colony to produce a new queen. Immediately after transferring bees to your hive, confine the bees by screening the hive entrance and replacing the top with a screen to provide ventilation during transport to your location.
If you opted to leave the old queen in your friend’s colony, you should avoid disturbing your new colony for three or four weeks while a new queen is being reared. But, if you are overcome with curiosity, you could take a quick peek after about a week to confirm that a queen emerged normally from the cells or that queen cells are being reared from the brood you transferred. After three weeks, your new queen should be starting to lay eggs. Be sure to provide a second brood chamber as needed to accommodate population growth and then add your honey super(s) at the beginning of the honey flow.
If you can’t persuade a friend to share or sell bees to you, then you have the option of keeping two colonies: overwintering one and extracting all of the honey from the “discontinued” hive that is not overwintered. After all brood has emerged from the discontinued colony, sacrifice the caged queen and transfer all bees to the overwintered colony.
Having a range of options can be confusing to the beginning beekeeper, but multiple options are part of the fun of beekeeping. All of these options still accommodate your responsibility as an urban beekeeper to keep no more than two colonies and to prevent swarms, which can cause big problems when they establish new colonies in urban structures.
An urban beekeeper in the Netherlands coaxes a swarming colony into a hive.
Potential Beekeeping Problems in Urban Environments
Almost everyone enjoys interacting with at least one kind of animal. Dogs and cats are the most common because they adapt beautifully to urban environments, but I cannot think of a single animal pet that doesn’t have the potential to cause some kind of problem. Dogs that bark and bite are perhaps the best example. Outdoor cats trespass and sometimes yowl at night. We should expect that bees can cause problems, too, especially if not managed properly. Fortunately, there are ways to avoid or deal with most potential bee problems. In any event, giving the neighbors an occasional complimentary jar of honey, ideally before any problems arise, is a smart move.
Overall, the odds of keeping your bees without incident are very much in your favor if you are aware of the pitfalls and take sensible precautions. Isolating your hives from view can be helpful under some circumstances. Installing a high, solid fence around your hives may be practical, not only from the standpoint of blocking the view but also for directing some of the bee flight upward and away from your yard. Attempts to keep your beekeeping activities secret rarely work. This is especially true if swarms from your hives cluster on your neighbors’ property.
Some beekeepers abuse the privilege of keeping bees in urban environments by keeping too many hives. It bears repeating that, if you live in an urban area, you should keep a maximum of two hives. This is extremely important! There simply aren’t enough nectar and pollen sources in most urban areas to support large numbers of colonies.
Fear of Bees
The widespread fear of bees and bee stings is probably the most serious problem for urban beekeepers. Neighbors sometimes call local authorities in an attempt to prevent beekeeping near their property. In extreme cases, there is even a risk of violence. The problem exists because too many people are uneducated regarding normal honey bee behavior. And too many beekeepers are uneducated regarding the fear of bees, technically known as melissophobia or apiphobia. Probably the most common mechanism for developing a “normal” fear is based on having been stung by an insect at some point in life. People usually identify stings as bee stings even though most stings come from other insects, especially yellow jacket wasps.
The best treatment for the fear of bees is exposure therapy. Repeated exposures to bees in a safe, comfortable environment in which people can watch bees almost always works. The problem is that a safe environment for a beekeeper may not be considered safe by someone with a bad case of bee fear. The typical beekeeper wants to show that bees are safe by donning the fearful person in protective clothing and then opening the hive, hoping to fascinate this person with the wonders of the colony. This is usually counterproductive, at least for the first exposure treatment.
Exposure therapy should begin by allowing the patient to observe outdoor bee activities through an observation window. One option is to train foraging bees to visit a feeder, similar to a hummingbird feeder, situated a few inches outside your window. Invite your neighbor over to enjoy a glass of wine, and both of you can press your noses against the window glass to watch the bees enjoying the sugar-syrup feast. Repeat this scenario on several occasions over a period of time until your patient is cured of his or her fear of being stung.
During your bee-watching session, you can discuss a lot of fascinating bee information with your friend. Emphasize that there is no sting risk when bees are foraging away from the hive area.
Another excellent type of exposure therapy is to place a hive just outside your observation window so that your “patient” can watch and you can explain activities at the hive entrance, such as bees coming and going with pollen, drones flying, and so on. Again, multiple exposures at different times is good, especially when pollen collection is very active.
A glass-walled observation hive, showing all the interesting activities inside the hive, is also a wonderful tool for exposure therapy. Maybe your local beekeeping club sponsors one that is displayed in a public venue. Having an observation hive is not a practical option in most homes.
Another option is to take your friend for a walk in the garden or down the street so you can observe bees foraging on flowers near familiar paths without ever causing problems. Your friend may suddenly realize that he or she has always walked near flowers without ever being stung. Maybe your friend has bees foraging on flowers in his or her own backyard that have gone unnoticed for years, again without ever being a sting threat. However, if your fearful friend discovers bees foraging in his or her backyard and consequently removes the plants, then you know you have a real problem!
Springtime hive maintenance. Fewer hives are better in an urban environment.
Finally, save your open-hive demonstration for last and don’t push your luck by taking the small risk of getting a sting during the demonstration. Just one sting, and you might have to repeat the entire exposure-therapy program from the beginning—or you may have to give up beekeeping until you get a new neighbor!
Realize that apiphobia can be so severe that it warrants the help of a professional therapist. However, in most cases, you should be successful in educating your friend and helping him or her at least tolerate your beekeeping hobby. Why not give your friend a good bee book to enjoy (hint, hint)? And remember that complimentary jar of honey? It can go a long way toward curing the symptoms of apiphobia. You will know you are a winner if your friend’s apiphobia symptoms only reappear each time the honey jar is empty. (There is no medical term for the fear of not receiving more free honey!) You could also invite the person to go with you to your beekeeping club meeting. Even if he or she declines, it’s the thought that counts!
Sensitivity to Bee Stings
In rare circumstances, a neighbor may have a known history of anaphylactic reactions to insect stings, and it is to your advantage to respect these circumstances. Be sure, by virtue of tests administered by a licensed allergist, that the sensitivity is specifically to honey bees. It is common that a person can experience anaphylaxis when stung by another insect, such as a yellow jacket wasp, and not be sensitive to honey bee venom. Be creative and keep your hives somewhere other than in your backyard but still nearby (maybe a friend’s yard?). You should make every effort to avoid litigation—or even the hint of litigation—at all costs. A sting now and then is OK for you, the bee lover, but that same sting on a neighbor can create an avalanche of problems that can end your hobby in its infancy.
Swimming-Pool Problems
There are two potential problems concerning interactions between bees and swimming pools. One is caused by locating colonies too near the pool. During the summer season, at least 1,000 bees in each colony die of old age each day! We spent many years designing and testing hive entrance traps to recover the bodies of bees that died inside the colonies. We found that approximately 90 percent of the bees died away from the hive area. Only 10 percent die inside the hive. Their bodies are removed from the hive by housecleaning “undertaker” bees and then airlifted and dropped away from the hive, usually within 50 yards (about 46 m). We determined this by coating bee bodies with a UV-light-reflecting powder and placing them in the hives so they could be removed and airlifted. At night, we scanned the area near the hive with a UV light to locate our “glowing” bee bodies.
Aerial “bombardment” with bee bodies is a good reason to avoid locating hives near swimming pools. What is a safe distance for the hive location? That depends upon the number of hives. For three or fewer hives, perhaps 50 yards (46 m) would be effective; for more hives, position them farther away.
Regardless of the distance between the hive(s) and the pool, some live bees, in the process of dying, will fall into the pool. Healthy bees do not fall into pools. The problem is that some people try to rescue them, using their hands. This is an invitation to a sting! Bees can be safely removed with a kitchen strainer. Dump them some distance from the pool, where they will likely become a meal for a lucky spider or some hungry ants. Pool owners should always have an “official bee strainer” in the pool area.
The second problem is that, under certain circumstances, some bees may collect water from the deck area. They are especially attracted to water with just the right concentration of salts and minerals. Pool water splashed on the deck evaporates, leaving attractive salt deposits. If no other water sources are available, they may even collect water from the pool, especially if it is a salt water pool. Beekeepers should explain to their neighbors that bees foraging for water around the pool are not a sting threat unless they are stepped on or handled. You may be able to keep water-foraging bees away from the area by spraying the deck with an insect repellant. (Let me know if this works, so I can take all of the credit!)
Beekeepers frequently try to prevent bees from visiting pools by placing open containers of water near the hives, which the bees usually ignore. A homemade water feeder, as previously discussed, is usually more successful.
Bee Poop
I bet that you haven’t given much thought to bee poop. Yes, they have to poop, too! A bee normally defecates while flying, expelling its feces, which is composed primarily of indigestible pollen “shells,” in one sudden burst. The most obvious deposits are on the shiny surfaces of vehicles. If inclement weather delays bees’ regular flights, feces accumulate in their guts, leading to a shower of fecal droppings when favorable weather arrives. The frequency of droppings decreases as the distance from the hive increases.
If you park your car near hives, you should expect to see a few brown fecal spots now and then. They don’t damage the paint, but they can be a challenge to remove. Soak them first and then use a professional cleaning product.
If you have a lot of colonies, and your neighbors who own those expensive sports cars parked in their driveways learn the source of the spots, you could have a problem. If you only have one or two hives at home, then fecal spotting should not be a significant issue. It’s not very smart to ask your neighbor if he or she is having a problem with fecal spotting—and you certainly should never locate a multiple-colony apiary near a car dealer’s fleet of parked vehicles!
Africanized Bee Threats
Africanized bees (AHBs) are established in the southern third of the United States. Major stinging incidents are rare, but they receive massive publicity. There is a real threat that well-meaning but misinformed citizens could attempt to ban urban beekeeping. They may demand that the organizations and agencies responsible for public safety take action, such as prohibiting hobby beekeeping, to protect their safety. If beekeeping were banned, the results could be a disaster for all concerned.
The best defenses against the AHB threat are to promote hobby beekeeping in urban and suburban areas and to take measures to ensure that beekeepers have properly managed colonies of bees. Otherwise, the Africanized bees, minus competition from European bees, would flourish. They would nest in homes, buildings, parks, and anywhere else where there are suitable cavities. They even nest in cavities in the ground. Consequently, the threat of stings in the urban community would be increased if urban beekeeping were prohibited.
It should be mandatory for all managed colonies to always have a queen with an identification tag or paint mark as proof that she was mated in an area where there were no Africanized drones. Another option would be to require registration for all colonies in urban areas so they could be inspected to ensure they do not have Africanized queens.
The Future of Urban Beekeeping
Predicting the future of almost anything is very risky these days. But I have taken many risks all my life, and I’ve survived, so here goes! I predict that the future of urban beekeeping is very promising, but only if beekeepers can learn to work together, just as they expect their bees to do. The greatest risk to urban beekeeping is the population explosion of “hyperenthusiastic” beekeepers who fail to realize the extent to which foraging opportunities for bees are limited in urban settings. It is absolutely essential that the number of bee colonies per acre in urban areas be regulated by some means. The numbers of beekeepers and hives must be known.
Without sensible, science-based regulations, there will be a significant reduction in honey production, as well as sacrifices in colony health, in areas overpopulated with bees. This is not conjecture; it is already documented. Nature will automatically limit the number of colonies as well as the number of hobby beekeepers.
If this trend continues, it is conceivable that hobby beekeeping could become more like the maintenance of other common pets. Colonies would no longer be useful as honey producers; instead, they would be pet bees. They would require frequent feeding with high-quality food to complement the deficient nectar and pollen resources. I hope this scenario will stimulate you to think critically, and respond constructively, to the challenge of balancing urban bee populations with the available foraging resources.
An Africanized honey bee feeds on a cluster of flowers.
