5 Homesteader Reasons to Find a Local Beekeeper

Are you a homestead gardener that has discovered how valuable bees are for successful harvests? Perhaps you’re interested in learning more about beekeeping on the homestead. Or maybe you just have a swarm of bees on your property that you don’t know how to handle! All these and more are great reasons for every homesteader to find a local beekeeper and keep them in your pocket as a vital homestead asset.

When I was first getting interested in beekeeping, I was in high school and had no idea how I would ever translate my interest into a hobby. All I knew was that I was fascinated by the little buggers, loved the smell of beeswax, and was utterly enchanted at the idea of producing honey.

Little did I know that I’d still be loving bees decades later!

So much of my initial understanding of beekeeping, its importance to our sustained food supply, and the romance of bees was communicated to me by my early relationships with local beekeepers who took me under their collective wing.

In our book, The Do It Yourself Homestead, each chapter includes a section on building the homestead community. This community is so vital to the success of the homesteading movement because we need each other’s support, experience, and education.

I would say that, for homesteaders, finding a local bee keeper is simply part of gathering the homestead community around you. Beekeepers and their bees are a valued part of homestead land management and food production. It’s just natural to bring them into your local circle.

Apart from their general value, there are other more specific reasons to seek out a local beekeeper and keep them tucked in your pocket, so to speak.

An Example of How a Local Beekeeper Can Help a Newbie

Fast-forward to me keeping in the intermountain west of Utah and its highland desert winter temps with sustained lows and piles of snow! I had to re-think my winter feeding strategies but I had no idea which would work the best.

I thought of using a top feeder which sits at the very top of the beehive and to which the bees can go collect nectar when they need it. The other option was an internal feeder placed directly inside the hive for easier access.

The top feeder meant that I could replenish the bees food if I needed to before spring without opening the hive (which can cool the hive too much in severe cold, causing damage).

The internal hive would be easier to access for the bees, but to check on it, I’d need to open the hive when it was still potentially very cold.

Which choice was best for my bees?!

I was advised by a local beekeeper that, from her experience, the internal feeder would ultimately be best even if I had to open the hive to replenish it. She said she’d lost a hive one winter because it got so cold that the bees never left the warmth of the internal hive to venture up to feed, even though they were hungry. I was just too cold!

Without her localized knowledge, I probably would have guessed wrong because I lacked her experience both with beekeeping and keeping bees in cold winter areas.

How Do I Find a Local Beekeeper?

Finding local beekeepers and associations shouldn’t be too hard these days with the Internet available. When I first got started with beekeeping, I was a teenager and I’m old enough to remember the days pre-Internet! I had to get my hands on the phone book, beekeeping supply catalogs, and use word of mouth to find my local bee keepers.

These days, every state in the US has large, state-wide beekeeping associations that I recommend you join for your state. These associations will often host conferences and workshops for learning more, and will keep you abreast of the local beekeeping new and regulations in your state.

You local beekeeper friend can help you find similar groups in your town or community. Many permaculture groups will host beekeeping seminars and field days.

These events are fantastic for newbie education in beekeeping, but they’re also great for experienced beekeepers. You’re never done learning when it comes to bees!

Your local school and homeschool groups can also make use of these instructional opportunities.

To get started with bee education and beekeeping information:

The American Beekeeping Federation (the ABF)
The Bee Conservancy
Save the Bees
Beekeeping Made Simple has a list that was updated in 2020 of beekeeping groups specific to each state in the US

For our overseas readers, an Internet search of “beekeeping association near me” should provide a place to get started. Here are two for our British and Australian readers:

British Beekeepers Association
Australian Honey Bee Industry Council (Although this is more professional group – Australia takes honey very, very seriously. They can point you in the right direction for hobby beekeeping, if that’s more your thing.)

2) Find a Local Bee Keeper for Swarm Removal

Even if you decide you’re not interested in keeping bees yourself, you may end up with a swarm on your homestead at some point. Unless you’re familiar with bees, it’s best not to try to remove a swarm by yourself.

How Do You Get Rid of Bees Without Killing Them?

Thank you for asking the question, “How do you get rid of bees without killing them?”! So many people simply reach for a can of insecticide without stopping to consider whether killing a swarm is the best idea.

The best way to remove the bees is to have an experienced bee handler do it for you. That’s when having a local beekeeper friend on tap will come in handy and quick! They can hook you up with local resources for safe honey bee removal that don’t include killing the hive.

The first thing they’ll ask you to do is to confirm that what you have is a honey bee swarm and not something else like a wasp. There are tens of thousands of insects classified as “bee” and only one of them is the honey bee.

The ABF can help you identify by site, and they also have a list of list of swarm and rescue removal for the US.

It’s preferable for the ecosystem, the general pollinator population, and the local area of your homestead that the bees be rescued by a local beekeeper and not destroyed. Pollinators, especially healthy honey bees are precious!

Pollinator.org has some further advice if you find a swarm and would like to how to become a bee rescuer instead of a bee destroyer.

3) Find a Local Bee Keeper to Set Up an Apiary

It’s one thing to decide you’d like to keep bees and even take classes, but it’s another thing altogether to actually set up a bee year, called an apiary.

Which way should the apiary orient to the sun?
Will you need winter protection from winds? A fire break?
What about accessibility to your home – in permaculture, we call this designing by zone.
How do you keep children, pets, and guests safe from bee stings?
What’s a beeline and how do you accommodate it?

And so many more questions!

A local, seasoned beekeeper can help you set up your bee yard in a way that answers all those questions. They have the experience you need to make these important decisions for the homestead in an intelligent way.

To get you started, one of my favorite online beekeeping resources is master beekeeper, Charlotte Anderson from Carolina Honeybees. Her website is informative, relevant, written in normal-homesteader speak, and she includes fun beeswax crafts and uses.

To give you an idea of what to ask your local beekeeper mentor, I suggest you read over Charlotte’s How to Set Up an Apiary (Bee Yard).

4) Find a Local Beekeeper for Honey Advice

If you’re already keeping bees, you may end up with an abundance of honey that you’d like to sell. That’s a great goal, and a wonderful way to spread the “gospel” of beekeeping. Honey is delicious and an excellent reason to keep bees!

However, there are legalities to selling honey even if the most regulatory relaxed states and you’ll need to know how to navigate that maze. You’ll have other questions, too. Here are a few things your local beekeeper mentor can help you with:

How do I legally process and package my honey for sale?
Is there a local place like a farmer’s market I can attend to sell? Perhaps a small, local grocery?
How do I decide which bottles to use?
Where can I go to get help designing a logo and packaging material?
Can I ship my honey?
What about liability insurance – do I need it?

I can think of a dozen other questions that easily come to mind when considering how best to sell your honey! You’re going to need local, expert help.

5) Find a Local Beekeeper to Help the Garden

If you’ve been gardening long, you will have already discovered that pollinator insects (one of which is the honey bee) are vital to the success of so many crops.

Sioux Honey has a concise list of crops that depend on the honey bee – this would make a great resource for a homeschool lesson, FYI.
Planet Bee also has a list but it furthers the discussion with an explanation of how honey bees work to secure our food supply and why we need bees, how they’re declining, and what we can do about it.

Even if you don’t want to keep bees yourself, as a gardener, there are several things you can do to help the honey bees and other pollinators.

You can incorporate bee-friendly plants in your regular vegetable and ornamental gardens. This is beneficial to both the insects and your garden harvests. This practice is often called companion, or guild planting.
In wet or dry areas of your homestead, you can establish rain gardens or xeriscaping that include pollinator plants.
With simple design, you can create a garden specifically for pollinators and even register it with groups like the Million Pollinator Garden Challenge, Pollinator Pathway, and others.
Host classes and garden/farm tours for children to share with them the value of the honey bee.

With a local beekeeper as your friend, all these projects get a lot easier because they can use their vast stores of interaction and observation with their own hives and gardens.

If you ever decide you’d like to borrow beehives for orchard pollination, your local beekeeping contacts can help with that, too.

She of the Bees

As a gardener/beekeeper aside, I love this short post from Pixie’s Pocket about Saint Gobnait, the Irish patron saint of bees and beekeepers whose feast day is February 11th. Since many areas of the US start seeing early spring deliveries of bees to new beekeepers by March, this is a great time of year to celebrate “She of the Bees”!