Hive to Riches - Starting a Beekeeping Business This book is a valuable resource to guide the beekeeper in their first three years. It guides the hobbyist, the part timer, and the commercial beekeeper in making money with honeybees. There are over 140 pages of valuable information and over 600 resources including: how much you can make, where to find the start-up cost, the learning cycle of beekeeping and the business of beekeeping. If you desire to start your own beekeeping business this book will set you on the right path.

A million pounds of honey. Produced by a billion bees! This memoir reconstructs the life of a young man from Pennsylvania as he drops into the bald prairie badlands of southern Saskatchewan. He buys a honey ranch and keeps the bees that make the honey. But he also spends winters in Florida swamps, nurse-maid to ten thousand dainty queen bees. From the dusty Canadian prairie to the thick palmetto swamps of the American south, the reader meets with simple folks who shape the protagonist's character - including a Cree rancher with three sons playing NHL hockey, a Hutterite preacher who yearns to roam the globe, a reclusive bee-eating homesteader, and a grey-headed widow who grows grapefruit, plays a nasty game of scrabble, and lives with four vicious dogs. Encompassing a ten-year period, this true story evolves from the earnest inexperience of the young man as he learns an art and builds a business. Carefully researched natural biology runs counterpoint to human social activities. Bee craft serves as the setting for expositions that contrast American and Canadian lifestyles, while exemplifying the harsh reality of a man working with and against the physical environment.

Being among bees is a full-body experience, Mark Winston writes—from the low hum of tens of thousands of insects and the pungent smell of honey and beeswax, to the sight of workers flying back and forth between flowers and the hive. The experience of an apiary slows our sense of time, heightens our awareness, and inspires awe. Bee Time presents Winston’s reflections on three decades spent studying these creatures, and on the lessons they can teach about how humans might better interact with one another and the natural world. Like us, honeybees represent a pinnacle of animal sociality. How they submerge individual needs into the colony collective provides a lens through which to ponder human societies. Winston explains how bees process information, structure work, and communicate, and examines how corporate boardrooms are using bee societies as a model to improve collaboration. He investigates how bees have altered our understanding of agricultural ecosystems and how urban planners are looking to bees in designing more nature-friendly cities. The relationship between bees and people has not always been benign. Bee populations are diminishing due to human impact, and we cannot afford to ignore what the demise of bees tells us about our own tenuous affiliation with nature. Toxic interactions between pesticides and bee diseases have been particularly harmful, foreshadowing similar effects of pesticides on human health. There is much to learn from bees in how they respond to these challenges. In sustaining their societies, bees teach us ways to sustain our own.

Over the last few decades, economists and psychologists have quietly documented the many ways in which a person's IQ matters. But, research suggests that a nation's IQ matters so much more. As Garett Jones argues in Hive Mind, modest differences in national IQ can explain most cross-country inequalities. Whereas IQ scores do a moderately good job of predicting individual wages, information processing power, and brain size, a country's average score is a much stronger bellwether of its overall prosperity. Drawing on an expansive array of research from psychology, economics, management, and political science, Jones argues that intelligence and cognitive skill are significantly more important on a national level than on an individual one because they have "positive spillovers." On average, people who do better on standardized tests are more patient, more cooperative, and have better memories. As a result, these qualities—and others necessary to take on the complexity of a modern economy—become more prevalent in a society as national test scores rise. What's more, when we are surrounded by slightly more patient, informed, and cooperative neighbors we take on these qualities a bit more ourselves. In other words, the worker bees in every nation create a "hive mind" with a power all its own. Once the hive is established, each individual has only a tiny impact on his or her own life. Jones makes the case that, through better nutrition and schooling, we can raise IQ, thereby fostering higher savings rates, more productive teams, and more effective bureaucracies. After demonstrating how test scores that matter little for individuals can mean a world of difference for nations, the book leaves readers with policy-oriented conclusions and hopeful speculation: Whether we lift up the bottom through changing the nature of work, institutional improvements, or freer immigration, it is possible that this period of massive global inequality will be a short season by the standards of human history if we raise our global IQ.

Honey bees—and the qualities associated with them—have quietly influenced American values for four centuries. During every major period in the country's history, bees and beekeepers have represented order and stability in a country without a national religion, political party, or language. Bees in America is an enlightening cultural history of bees and beekeeping in the United States. Tammy Horn, herself a beekeeper, offers a varied social and technological history from the colonial period, when the British first introduced bees to the New World, to the present, when bees are being used by the American military to detect bombs. Early European colonists introduced bees to the New World as part of an agrarian philosophy borrowed from the Greeks and Romans. Their legacy was intended to provide sustenance and a livelihood for immigrants in search of new opportunities, and the honey bee became a sign of colonization, alerting Native Americans to settlers' westward advance. Colonists imagined their own endeavors in terms of bees' hallmark traits of industry and thrift and the image of the busy and growing hive soon shaped American ideals about work, family, community, and leisure. The image of the hive continued to be popular in the eighteenth century, symbolizing a society working together for the common good and reflecting Enlightenment principles of order and balance. Less than a half-century later, Mormons settling Utah (where the bee is the state symbol) adopted the hive as a metaphor for their protected and close-knit culture that revolved around industry, harmony, frugality, and cooperation. In the Great Depression, beehives provided food and bartering goods for many farm families, and during World War II, the War Food Administration urged beekeepers to conserve every ounce of beeswax their bees provided, as more than a million pounds a year were being used in the manufacture of war products ranging from waterproofing products to tape. The bee remains a bellwether in modern America. Like so many other insects and animals, the bee population was decimated by the growing use of chemical pesticides in the 1970s. Nevertheless, beekeeping has experienced a revival as natural products containing honey and beeswax have increased the visibility and desirability of the honey bee. Still a powerful representation of success, the industrious honey bee continues to serve both as a source of income and a metaphor for globalization as America emerges as a leader in the Information Age.

The husband-and-wife team behind the nonprofit HoneyLove make the case that beekeeping ought to be treated as more than a hobby or money-making enterprise. It is an entrance into a complex and sometimes fierce world that must be engaged and understood on its own terms.

Learn everything you need to know to start your colony with this straightforward, highly visual guide for beginning beekeepers. Featuring more than 120 color photos, Beginning Beekeeping will teach any beginner how to foster and maintain healthy, vibrant colonies. You’ll learn how to set up a colony and attract bees, how to incorporate best practices and techniques for keeping colonies strong, and how to troubleshoot and treat a broad range of common hive issues. Along the way, you’ll learn how to harvest your honey and keep your bees healthy and happy. Included in Beginning Beekeeping: · Practical information on how a hive works, how and where to set up hives for maximum success, buying and installing bees, feeding bees, and more, with recommendations for both urban and rural settings · Effective treatment recommendations for dealing with common hive pests and diseases including mites, foulbrood, and colony collapse disorder (CCD), with recommendations for both conventional and organic treatments · Tips for dealing with common hive issues such as swarming, robbing, absconding, as well as guidance for managing aggressive hives and tips for keeping a queenright colony · Instructions for enjoying rich, bountiful honey harvests, and instructions for processing and storing the honey and wax from your hives, as well how to make products from your harvest · Seasonal guidance to ensure your hives return healthy and strong each and every year If you’re new to beekeeping, Beginning Beekeeping is the perfect companion to get you started!

This book describes and illustrates the results of more than fifteen years of elegant experimental studies conducted by the author to investigate how a colony of bees is organized to gather its resources. The results of his research--including studies of the shaking signal, tremble dance, and waggle dance--offer the clearest, most detailed picture available of how a highly integrated animal society works.