 As you might be able to tell by looking up front, this is the talk on how to get started in urban beekeeping. Please welcome Henry Sands. Hi, my name's Henry. I'm an urban beekeeper. Just as a bit of a prerequisite to this talk, this talk will not be on techniques of beekeeping. What this will be is this will be about the practicalities and investment that you need to put forward to be an urban beekeeper. If you want to learn about how to actually keep bees, go to a, there are training sessions everywhere and I will cover that later on in the talk. It's not working now. So me, my name's Henry. I'm an urban beekeeper from London or Essex in the barking areas close enough. I'm a techie by trade, I'm a sys admin. So this is something nice and completely different for me. And previous to keeping bees in London, I used to keep bees in a rural environment on the Isle of Wight where I kept bees for a number of years. I've only been an urban beekeeper for one year. So take everything I say with a huge grain of salt. Why would you want to be a beekeeper? If you're, I imagine most people here are some way tech oriented, whether it's in their jobs or whether it's in their hobbies. Beekeeping is so insanely different to everything else. It's a mixture of completely unique skills, animal husbandry, practical stuff, you're outside. There's no reason to have a phone and it's just a complete getaway from your standard everyday tech life and it's a really, really good disconnect. It's a great conversation piece. You guys are all here listening to me talk so it can't be that bad. You can get honey. It's not guaranteed. It's very much depends on what the bees want to do for you and of course you enjoy suffering. So as we'll see in the next slide. So the three guarantees of the three S's. You'll get sticky. Everything in the beehive is sticky. You'll get sweaty. As you can see I'm in a lovely full bee suit with wellies, gloves and I'll have my hood on. You're out in the blazing sunshine in the middle of the day in 30 degree heat in this and you're going to be in it for like three or four hours at a time depending on how many you have to do. You tip your wellies out at the end of that standard practice. It's not comfortable in the world and you will get stung. If you are squeamish about getting stung by bees, this is not the hobby for you. You don't get stung as much as people would expect. A lot of people say you open hive bees everywhere getting stung. Generally bees only sting you in two occurrences. Either they're a really aggressive hive and there's something wrong with them or you've accidentally squashed a bee. How many people here have stood on a bee in the grass eating the clover and got stung in the foot? A decent number of people. That's the usual way you get stung. You've squashed a bee and it's going to sting you. Generally for bees flying around they have no interest in stinging you whatsoever. There are advantages and disadvantages to urban beekeeping and there are advantages and disadvantages to rural beekeeping. If we go down the urban list, people have gardens and there are lots of gardens and there are lots of plants in urban environments. The biodiversity in an urban environment is much higher than the rural environment. This is a benefit and it's a drawback. The benefit is you get very interesting honey and you get constant different flavours every time you take a honey. Honey doesn't just taste of honey. If you guys want to come to the London Hackspace Village afterwards, I might have some jars where people can taste. It's very cool. So you have people with gardens, you have stuff that you would never see in the countryside. There is also a lot of flowering trees which you don't get a huge amount of in the countryside. So paths, roads, parks, cities love flowering trees because they're pretty. You're less susceptible to drought because people water their gardens. In the countryside, fields get parched. We saw this this year very, very heavily. As soon as you get a drought environment, flowers don't produce nectar anymore. Once they don't produce nectar, there's nothing for the bees to turn into honey so you don't get any honey. In the city where people use hoses and they water their gardens, that's much less of an issue. We saw that very heavily this year. The city beekeepers did very, very well this summer. The rural beekeepers suffered quite greatly. If you get a really long, long, long drought, the bees can die of thirst as well, but that's very rare. Far fewer pesticides in urban environments. Pollutants aren't really a huge issue. It probably does bother the bees but not to the extent that pesticides do. Farmers will spray their fields with just about anything if they thought it would get them more money. The vast majority of them are commercial farmers, they're in it for the money. That's fine, I'm not bashing that but it does mean that your honey can sometimes be laced with it if it was particularly close and sometimes it can damage your hive, it can damage your colony. That goes down to the monocrop as well. This ties in with the top one. In rural environments you have large fields of individual plants like oil seed rate or lavender or heather, which gives you a very single flavoured honey. There are advantages and disadvantages that I'll go through when we go through the rural. The main downside is limited space. In rural environments you can have entire fields go nuts, they get used to cows maybe once a couple of months or you can stick them at the edge of fields, there's spaces in abundance. In urban environments it's much, much, much more difficult. Public nuisance, you have to be quite careful where you put your bees. Generally they won't bother anyone but as soon as someone spots a beehive you will find out that they're allergic even though being allergic to bees is very, very rare, properly allergic. If you swell up when you get stung that's not an allergic reaction, that's the standard reaction to a bee sting. That's completely normal. For rural, orchards and fields, bountiful crop, you can get single flavour honey, which you can then market as single flavour honey. I can't remember the exact rules but say you wanted to sell honey as apple blossom honey. In a sample, I can't remember how big the sample has to be but they count the pollinates inside it and there is a percentage that it has to hit for it to be counted as apple blossom honey. I think it might be like 80% or something of the pollen must come from an apple tree. In an orchard that's really, really easy to do. In the city it's almost impossible. Likewise, so, oily grape fields produce a garganturant amount of honey but the honey is very, very plain tasting and it can also crystallise in the comb and be very, very hard to extract. But you get loads of it so some people love it. Monocrop culture ties into the first one. There are advantages and disadvantages. There is more pesticides which is basically a flat disadvantage. If you go and put your beehives down next to your field and the farmer is sowing crops in that field and you go to him, hey Mr Farmer, can you please not put pesticides on your field? He will laugh at you and then tell you to get off his land. And the last one which is the main bonus which is this huge apple space. Finding space for my apiary in London took me about a year to try and find somewhere which had a decent amount and the proper access and I will go through that in a sec. Prerequisites and practicalities of being a beekeeper. So it is not for everyone. There are things that you need to be able to do to be a beekeeper. There are ways to work around them but generally there is a main thing. Number one is don't be allergic to bees. That is a really bad idea. Even if you carry an epi pen, I have seen it where people have got stung and they have just collapsed straight over into anaphylactic shock. It is very horrible. Don't risk it. If you are so insistent on becoming a beekeeper and you have allergic reactions to bee stings, there are immunotherapy courses that you can go on. It does not work for everyone and it takes a long time. But that might be an option if you are really insistent. But as a general rule, if you are allergic, don't do it. Just buy your honey from someone else. It will be cheaper in the long run, trust me. The requirements are space, time, money, transport and physical strength. I will go through those now. This is the first thing you need to look at. When you want to keep bees, you need to know where you are going to put them. SAS, secure, accessible, safe. Beehive theft is a thing and it is increasingly becoming a thing. When you have invested the amount of time and effort that you have into your bees and you have got a nice big colony, they are producing really well. Someone comes along and steals them, it sucks. It also puts you out about a grand. So a good strong hive in a hive and all of the equipment is worth about a thousand quid. So it is not small business. We have had a big spate of them in Essex where people have driven land drivers and transit vans into the back of people's apirys at the middle of the night. Taiped all the hives upload to them and have been gone in 15 minutes. They have lost 20 hives, so that is 20,000 pounds. It is quite hard to get insurance for beehives. It is quite hard to prove that yours were the beehives that were stolen. Generally, where you have stuff in a rural environment, it won't be an offence area. In the urban environment, it is a bit easier to fence it off. So secure generally have a great fence or be in an area with a great fence like an allotment association generally offenced off. Make sure the gate is locked. Make sure people can't just drive a van up to your apiary site and steal all your bees in once. Also you don't want people to stumble across them. Vandals are a thing. I have had hives knocked over. Other people have had hives knocked over. Board kids will come along and kick hives over. They will pay for it because they get stung to bits, but they will still do it. You still have a hive that is on the floor for the next week because you don't know that it has been kicked over. Accessible is another one. There are two main things here. It has to be comfortable to access with a vehicle because you will need to get a vehicle there, whether that is a vehicle nearby or you have access to transport or you can at least sort something out. The second one is you need to be able to access it 24x7. The day that you have allotted for beekeeping that week, it might be pouring down with rain. You can't inspect a hive when it is pouring down with rain. You might have to do it somewhere else. If you ever need to move a bee hive, you have to do it in the middle of the night. You don't want to move a bee hive when a load of bees from that hive are out flying and doing things. They all come back in at night. They come back in, you seal them up, you carry them off at 3am in the morning, plonk them down where you want them to be again, remove the hive and they are good to go, but it does have to be at night. The last one is safe. Safe is the most important one and there are three kind of safes you need. It needs to be safe for you operating and doing stuff with your bees. It needs to be safe for the bees and it needs to be safe for the general public. This is the biggest damling box. You can find sites that are secure. You can find sites that are accessible. Finding sites that are safe is very hard. A bad example of a safe site will be a flat roof that you need to use a ladder to get onto. When you are wearing these bee suits, your peripheral vision is very, very, very poor. It is very easy to just back yourselves off and take a tumble. If you are going to put bees on a flat roof, make sure there is a safety barrier around or if you are going to put them on the roof of a building, make sure that there is a safety barrier or you are suitably far from the edge. Safe for bees is less of a concern because bees will generally look after themselves. Safe for the general public is make sure bees aren't going to be flying into people's windows. Make sure the flight... ..fave has an entrance and from the entrance the bees will fly out of fly out like it's an aeroplane taking off. That's called the flight path. You need to make sure that's clear or that's obstructed in a way where it won't have bees flying straight into people, flying straight into public hallways, flying straight into windows because then you're going to have problems. Good sites, allotments, very good. They're usually quite friendly to have bees on site. I've had a couple of nos from people, but generally they're very good. Communal garden sites as long as they are fenced in and the gate is locked, also good. Rooftops, so business rooftops, businesses in urban environments are really sort of catching on to this at the moment and generally you can get 24-hour access of them. Either you can meet someone there because you don't need to have late night access all that often, but you do need to have it. And that's it. So this is the biggest commitment is your personal time. There are busy periods of beekeeping and there are quiet periods of beekeeping. The spring is the busiest period by far. You need to be inspecting your bees, doing a full colony inspection at least once a week. If you don't, your bees will swarm, which is how beehives multiply. They bring on the new queen and the old queen as well as half of the bees will fly off and go and stick themselves in a tree and then find a new home somewhere. There are two reasons why this is a problem. One, they will find a home anywhere. Peoples, chimneys, going nuts, anywhere that's dark, big and has access, good enough. If we've got time, I'll show you some fantastic bonus content of what it's like to remove beehive from one of those locations. It's your responsibility as the beekeeper to make sure that you husbandry your bees properly. The spring is the most important time for that. Once a week, check for signs of swarming. Summer, you're still busy. You're making sure they've got enough space. You're checking for diseases. You've checked for diseases in the spring, but in the summer it's more prevalent. You're still watching for signs of swarming. That's kind of once a week, but if you skip a week, it's not the end of the world. Autumn is stuff when stuff starts to wind down, so you can do it once a fortnight or around about. You can still do it once a week if you really want to, but there's no huge need. You want to check that they have enough stores and bits and bobs won't go through that later. This is whole days, by the way, or at least half days depending on the amount of hives you have. I have six hives. It takes me one whole day to do all of the bee stuff that I want properly. If you have two hives, it may take you a long morning, and so on and so on. In the winter, you don't need to touch them at all. It's great. You can box them up in October when it starts to get cold. They don't hibernate, per se, but they will stay in their hive for the whole of winter and keep themselves warm and just wait there until the spring arrives. So maybe check them once on a bright sunny day midwinter, just by opening the top and seeing if they're still alive, other than that, just leave them. Then it comes around to the spring again, and you're busy again. Bee keeping is not cheap. It is not a cheap hobby to start. Once you've started, there are also ongoing costs, but it's nowhere like the start-up. When you start, you always want to start with two bee hives. The reason for that is if one bee hive goes wrong, you can merge the two bee hives together to make one big strong hive, or you can take components of the good hive and use it to fix the other hive. Having two hives is really good. If you only have one hive and it goes bad, it's dead. There's nothing you can really do about it, goodbye bees. Two bee hives is the way to go. First-year costs, so you'll need your hive equipment, which I have some here. It's not overly expensive, but it does add up. Bee smoker, smokes bees. The liquid smoke that certain companies sell is not particularly fantastic. The idea of the smoke is it blocks pheromones like attack pheromones, and the bees are all about the smell, and it calms them down heavily. A lot of people have this, oh yeah, but they are upset to the bees. It does, but having upset bees is a lot better than you being stung 10, 20 times when you've accidentally dropped a frame, and they're all angry now. So very important. Where are we? Hive tool, they come in many different types. They're about £12 each. I have two or three of them. These are pretty much the kind of standard thing. This is how you manipulate the hive. If you do a course on beekeeping, you will see probably two or three of these. Find one which you like, find one which works for the way that you want to do beekeeping. There's other tools like bee brushes and gloves. Other equipment, I'm wearing standard neoprene gloves. Bees can sting through them. Bees can sting through this. It just gives you a bit of air gap in space layer. I have really thick and really tough lamb skin gloves. Bees can sting straight through these as well. There's no defence. It's a really, really sharp stinger. Having the better manipulation and mobility on the dexterity of thin gloves is much better than having these thick gloves. There's also other advantages which I will probably explain in the Q&A. It doesn't cover too much. You'll need to buy hive equipment. So there are a couple of... Just to go over hives briefly, there's two main camps of hive. There's your wooden hives and there's your polystyrene hives. As a person thing, I prefer polystyrene hives, but wooden hives are fine too. It's whatever you find. Polystyrene hives come pre-assembled. They have better insulating qualities and they are lighter. Wooden hives look nicer. You can stain them whatever colour you want and they're a bit more traditional. Find out what works for you. There's no right way to do it. You'll need a full hive, so a floor, a brood box of which there are a couple of different types. Queen excluders, the frames to go inside the brood box and then honey supers which is where the bees put the honey. You also need spare equipment because bees will jump out at you and catch you very, very unexpected. It's very useful to have stuff on hand. Overwintered hives. When you get your first hives, I suggest very, very heavily you buy overwintered nukes from a local reputable supplier. There are a couple of companies out there that breed bees. They're great. They catch swans When you get one of these overwintered hives, they do the stuff for you. They will check that they are disease free. They will check that they have a good temperament which is very, very important. They will just generally make sure that it's a strong colony. If you buy an overwintered hive, you know they're a strong colony because they've survived the winter. They will come in what's called nukes or nucleus hives. Those are half-sized hives for small colonies. That gives you two things. It gives you the bees and it gives you a nuke which is an incredibly useful thing. Personal equipment. Bee keeping suit. These range anywhere from 50 to 250 pounds. Don't buy anything that's cheaper than 50 pounds. You can see them on ebay or stuff. They fall to bits and they're horrible and you'll end up hating them and you'll end up eating them. Gloves. I very much suggest a hat because it's outside and it gives a bit of gap. This hood, bees can sting straight through it and getting stung on top of your head really sucks. You will also need a good pair of wellies. Bees can't sting through wellies. If you're manipulating a beehive, one of the frames and you drop it, it's going to end up on your feet 100 bees who are really angry on your feet. A good pair of wellies is a must even if it's really, really, really hot. This is a very guesstimated figure depending on where you are and depending on what you go for. This can go anywhere south of 1,000 upwards of 2,000 plus. Transport and strength. Bee keeping is physically active. It's physically tiring. If you're moving honey and you're moving bees around, a full super of honey doesn't look that big. It weighs 40 pounds and you're carrying it like this. This is where the choice of space comes in as well because obviously you don't want to carry it quite that far to your car. If you are physically incapable or if you... Hello. If you are physically incapable or you have a bad back, this might not be the hobby for you. If you have a friend even better, moving a full strong colony of bees before winter when it's all full of honey is a two-person job. Don't try and lift it yourself. If you have the hands of bees that you have to outstretch for, you will destroy yourself. Which means you might have to buy a second bee suit. Transport. Car is ideal. I would not do this hobby without a car or a van or at least a very, very, very reliable friend who has a car or a van. Or the only way to get around this really is if you have a very local apiary. I wouldn't have an apiary in your garden because unless you have very, very, very very good friends with your neighbours and they will be there for the remainder of their life and the remainder of your life it's just drama incarnate. Don't take bees on public transport. It's a really bad idea. So you've gone through all the prerequisites. It's great. You think I can do this. I'm strong enough. I'm fit enough. I've got the money. I've got the space. I'm going to invest. I've got a car or I've got a friend with a car. Fantastic. How do you get started? First thing you want to do is get trained. This is very important. Investigate local associations and go on a beginner course. Almost every area in the country has a local beekeeping association. A lot of them are very, very old. They're run by very, very old people and they do things in a very, very old way. You might find that infuriating. Unfortunately, you're going to have to live with it because they're the people that do the training. They're all really lovely people, but it's like we don't accept bank transfers. We only accept checks. Who writes checks nowadays? Do the course. The courses usually start in... The sign-ups are usually in August and they will run through the theoretical stuff over the winter and they will do a couple of practical sessions to give you a bit of experience in the spring. This is the number one thing you should do. Go on the course. Don't try and freehand it yourself. It's super, super, super useful. After you've gone on the course, make sure you still want to do it. Don't feel invested that you've paid 60, 70 quid to go on this course and now you're not quite sure or your circumstances have changed. Once you've got bees, getting rid of them is actually surprisingly hard because a lot of people won't take beehives from other people because they don't know how they've been raised. You can sell them. It's slightly trickier than it sounds. Find an appropriate site is the second one. That might even go above the training, but this last for a while sites tend to fluctuate if you don't take them. Join the British Beekeeping Association. Really, really important. Join the local association if you can. A lot of times that will give you membership to the British Beekeeping Association as well. What that offers you straight off the bat is disease insurance. There are two very horrible diseases that are in this country. There are two very horrible diseases, one of them that isn't in this country, but we need to be very, very vigilant about. The first one is European fowl brood. The second one is American fowl brood. If you have either of those diseases in your hive, you must report it to the national bee... I can't remember what they're called. It's basically a national body that's in charge of beekeeping and they send out bee inspectors. If you have EFB in your hive, they will tell you to tape up your hive and then burn it. That's the only thing you can do. Bees, wax, honey, everything inside is the equipment. Just set it on fire. You can't cure EFB or AFB and to lose one hive is much better than to let it spread. So what the BBKA do is they insure hives. It's part of your membership unless you go over a specific number of hives and it gives you money back for any honey or equipment that has been lost. It's very handy. As I said earlier, all the bees are local source. If you're in London, Pains Bee Farm is very good. There are others dotted around the country. See what bees other people have got and read some reviews. Do not go out and get a swarm. Collecting a swarm is slightly more advanced and you do not start off with a good colony. Last one, you've got a space. You've got your bees in order. Go to your apiary or whatever space you've cut out and make it suitable for your ongoing hobby. So whether that's clearing waste ground, building hive stands, making sure access routes are clear, setting up fences to protect the public, anything like that. And assemble and paint all your equipment. So first spring, you've got your bees, and they've given you a fun call. Great, let's go. Go off in your car, go and grab them, come back, put them on your site, put them on the hive stands that you've made, leave them for three days. Don't be tempted to look inside them, otherwise you could annoy the bees enough that they'll just abscond and go find somewhere else. Doesn't happen a whole lot, but if you annoy them too much, it does. This is going down the nuke route, by the way. Usually when you get a nucleus of hives, it's all ready to go into a big hive. You just get it in a small one. So I'm going to have to chew through this really quickly. Inspect weekly, like I said earlier, make sure it's good. Check for swarming behaviour. On the first year, decide what you want to do. So you can build up this hive and then you can split it again and have two hives, but you'll have no honey. Or you can leave it and focus on honey production because you can only have the single hive. It's up to you. The bees may choose for you. You might not get a choice. Inspect weekly, keep an eye out for late swarms, keep an eye on disease. In your beekeeping course, they should do a decent section on spotting disease. Things like Cate Wing, Chalk Brood and European Fowl Brood and a couple of others. First autumn, when you're doing inspections, you now want to be seeing less brood and more honey because they'll start infalling to keep their stores up for the winter. If you need to feed them, feed them and then you must treat them. Veroamites are a small parasitic mite that every single hive in the country has. If you have a beehive, it has veroamites in. They are a vector for disease and the general health of your hive is determined by the amount of veroamites in. There are loads of different treatments. Pick out one, find one that works for you. Winter, you've done your last inspection. It's getting chilly. Take some bee fondant which is kind of like cake fondant but designed for bees. Stick it on top of the hive, close them up for winter, leave them. Put a mouse guard on the front because mice love to camp inside beehives winter because it's nice and warm. Bees hate mice. They won't sting them, they won't get rid of them, they can't stand the smell. And then leave them be until next summer. The golden advice to take from this is take everything you hear from anyone with a pinch of salt. There are a thousand and one ways to keep bees. There is no correct way but there are incorrect ways. Find a way that is suitable for you and most importantly enjoy yourself. Have fun in what you're doing. It's a really, really, really pleasant hobby if you get into it. You're outside, you're in the sun, it's good. You turn your phone off, you can just enjoy yourself. It's very, very nice. Thank you very much. I'm not going to do your questions here but I'll go through a bit bonus content. I'm not going to do Q&A here if you want to have questions answered because a lot of the answers can take hours and hours and hours. I'm up at the London Hackspace Village. If you want to come up there after this talk, I'll answer any questions that you have and go into as much detail as possible. Right now I'm going to go through a bit of bonus content in the last five minutes of as a beekeeper, as a novice beekeeper, why you should never say yes to removing a beehive colony from someone's house, a photograph adventure into suffering. So my director at my company had a beehive in his house that he told me about. I went to go and take it out. It's under his extension roof which is three metres off the ground so we built a scaffold tower and went through with it. And there's the hive. We had to take off all the tiles. I don't know if you can see it particularly well. It was a big hive, way bigger than we were expecting. This took us 10 hours to remove. So we started chopping away. There's all the bees and they're all in this situation and we're all bending over and trying to stuff them into hives. There's some more. You can see the bee space that the bees take so the bees build their comb apart from each other, the width of two bees back to back. As soon as they start touching they stop building their comb. This is all wild comb. The beehive have been there for about four years and what we do is we'll take it, we'll cut all of the brood out, put it into a frame and so we cut all the bees out and we're like, this isn't enough bees for this amount of wax and comb. Where the hell are they? There they are. They're in another part of the hive and bees when they get to this concentration behave like a liquid I literally sat there for about three hours hand scooping them out and tipping them into a hive. So there they are going into their new hive, you tip them in the front and eventually put the queen in there, it smells like home so the bees will come in. On the top of the scaffolding you can see it up there which was a very long horrible day. Fix the roof, I'm quite chuffed with that, that's my first roof fix. We left it like that, put a couple of signs around it saying, warning bees! I left them there for a week, came back, took the hive, sealed up fully, this is how you transport a hive. You see everything that could come off will come off, tape it as much as you can and then strap it firmly down to a supporting base. And then one week later it goes into my apre with my other bees, so they were saved and they weren't poisoned. Woo! Thank you very much! And that's it. Done, done, done. Like I said, if you want to come up to the London Hackspace Village I will answer any questions you have or if you want to come up to just outside here and catch me before I run up there then that's cool too.