WHY DO YOU WANT TO BE A BEEKEEPER?
If your only mission is to "save the bees": plant trees instead. Please understand that honey bees are not native to the US, they are actually livestock and originated in Europe. They are, however, valuable pollinators for agriculture and are providing us with delicious honey and valuable propolis and wax. If you want to save bees check out our plant these to save the bees.
If your only mission is to get honey, you should buy it from a local beekeeper instead. The vast majority of first-year hives will not produce a surplus for you to harvest.
But... if you're interested in honey bee biology, behavior, like trying new things, like solving problems, and don't mind sticky messes, and plenty of failures... try beekeeping!
GET STARTED ON YOUR JOURNEY THIS FALL/WINTER
The beekeeping season starts in the fall-winter. That's when you need to start taking your beekeeping 101 courses, buying and building equipment, and most importantly ordering your bees for spring.
If it's already past winter, make a plan for next year and start reading.
Maryland has a very short window for the bees to ramp up in spring, especially when getting started. The best chance for success for both the hive and the beekeeper is to have your bees at the beginning of spring.
JOIN A LOCAL BEEKEEPING CLUB AND TAKE A BEGINNER CLASS
Find your local bee club and see if they are offering a class (most do), they are usually held in winter or very early spring. Check out our resources page for some of the local clubs we belong to.
Or check out the Maryland Beekeepers Association page to find a club local to your area.
If you missed the boat on a local class check out the Penn State Extensions online Beekeeping 101 course.
FIGURING OUT WHAT EQUIPMENT TO GET
Starting out can be very confusing, there are so many different ways to keep bees, and many different common names for the same piece of equipment.
For starting out we recommend running all 10 frame medium (6 and 5/8th) Langstroth equipment.
90% of the feedback or advice folks will give you is based on 10 frame Langstroth equipment, it will also be the easiest type of equipment for you to find for purchase.
Mediums are lighter and easier to lift and running all one size of equipment means everything is interchangeable. Learn the basics of beekeeping first on a 10 frame Langstroth set up and then experiment with any of the many other kinds of equipment and techniques out there.
We recommend you start with 2-3 hives. This is because it makes it a lot easier to judge how the colony is doing against another colony and in beekeeping we do a lot of swapping of resources to even out or boost colonies- it can literally mean life or death for a struggling colony to get eggs, brood, or honey from one of your other hives. When I was starting out and heard this advice, I was very skeptical of the information coming from a man that sold bees for a living... But after my first year of keeping bees, I realized that having more than one colony was a key element for success.
The hard truth is that beekeeping is very expensive to get started and there is a high rate of failure, especially in the first 1-3 years.
With it being so expensive, there is always an interest in buying used equipment, but we have to warn that you are opening your bees up to potential diseases. Ask why are they selling their equipment, how did their bees die, or why are they getting out of beekeeping? Do some hard reference checks on who you are getting it from and if there have been any American Foul Brood (AFB) issues in that area. If you bring home equipment and it has AFB spores in it you will have to burn the hives, equipment, bees, and all. If you are looking to save some money look for deals on new equipment in November or March.
Roughly budget:
$500-600 per hive ($200 for bees $300-400 for hive equipment)
$100-300 per beekeeper for personal equipment for the beekeeper (hive tool, smoker, bee suite etc)
The sky is the limit for extra stuff!
This is our list of recommended equipment to get going: HERE