How to Start Your Own Beekeeping Program

Beekeepers gathered around for a hive demonstration.

What could be more fun than sharing honey with your local community? How about the joy of sharing beekeeping with them? Many people reach out to us here at Betterbee for help proposing and running beekeeping programs, clubs, or groups at their organization. We’ve decided to write this guide to help them (and you) get started and avoid some common pitfalls. 

• Consider an observation hive that you can take "on tour" to local schools and other locations. This allows you to bring a hive to people without worrying about the weather or other factors. We don't recommend keeping bees full-time in observation hives because it can be challenging, but they are great for 1-2 day trips. We always recommend putting TempQueen into a hive when you steal their queen to make an observation hive. It reduces the chances of the bees making an emergency replacement queen while their mother is "on vacation.”

• Keep a collection of spare suits and jackets. The more spares you have, the more people you can take to observe hives! The amount of extras is something to keep in mind before you plan a "hive open house" and have 20 people show up to see the bees. Your beekeeping peers may even be willing to donate their old ones to help your club.

• Educational hives benefit from a social media presence. Plan a post about your hives on your page for the first of every month, and take photos of the hives and inspections to share with your followers. Hives can even be deserving of their very own page. It all depends on how much time an internet-savvy person has to devote to sharing information about the colonies. 

• Equip a hive with some high-tech sensors, like the BroodMinder system. With these, the data can be collected with your phone during inspections (or even in real-time if you buy some extra hardware) and people can visit a web page to look at the graphs and see how the bees are doing. Social media posts can link directly to the graphs, to show how well the bees are faring on a cold winter day. 

• Get a honey straw display filled with different flavors of honey straws. We keep a wooden honey straw box (though you could just use a few clean labeled jars) full of natural varietal honey. Our favorite flavors are pure honey (mostly clover), wildflower honey (mostly fall flowers), buckwheat, orange blossom, and blackberry blossom. It lets us give away honey straws to field trips and other visitors, and lets them taste the diversity of honey flavors that come from the bees visiting different plants. It's a great way to end a presentation or to let people engage with the bees without actually having to get into the hives! Of course, you can also do this with a few jars of different kinds of honey (one from your hives themselves, if they produce enough for you to harvest!) but the straws are often cleaner and simpler. 

• Set up a gardening program. Maybe get some volunteers to help start a garden for an afternoon, and then send them home with a packet of seeds that they can plant at home to help honey bees and native pollinators. Purchasing seeds is affordable, and you can even buy a big pack of seeds and then break them down into smaller portions for people to take home for free. The wildflower mixes and white clover are some of our best sellers.

• Arrange to bring an expert beekeeper in for a lecture. If you don't have anyone handy in your area, you may want to set up a presentation by a Betterbee speaker. We offer Zoom presentations on various bee topics. If we can get up to the area, we can even give an in-person presentation.

• Distribute our free and downloadable resources. One of our favorites is the glossary of bee terms. If you find yourself teaching future beekeepers, you're welcome to download the PDF version of the glossary from the top of that page and pass it around to your students. If you find other articles or resources we've produced, just ask us if it's okay to print them, and we'll usually say, "Sure!" We also have a Beekeeping Quick Guide and an archive of our monthly newsletter articles. 

• Play videos from our YouTube Channel. We have tons of great videos filmed by our Head Beekeeper herself. They’re great resources for those looking to get started and beekeepers with more experience.

Remember that you can always ask for help! Feel free to contact us directly or reach out to local bee clubs, beekeeping Facebook groups, mentors, or your beekeeping peers. 

Also, be sure to check out our video, Interview with Experts: Anne Frey where David Peck and Anne Frey sit down and talk all about how to introduce new people to beekeeping!