Beekeeping, also known as Apiculture is the maintenance of Beehives by Humans. The person who maintains the beehives and collects the Bee products or sells the bees to another person is called the Beekeeper. Bees are kept in a location called the Beehive or an apiary. Beekeeping also includes producing cross-breeds, protecting bees from diseases, along with honey productivity.
History and Origin of Beekeeping
Collecting honey from bee hives has been an ancient culture. Primitive man used to collect honey from natural beehives. Today, with more than 20000 species of Honey Bees apiculture has become a complete science. There are various types of bees like mason bees, bumblebees, Italian bee, European dark bee, Carnilan honey bee, Buckfast bee etc available all around the world.
Wild and Domestic Honey Harvesting
Extracting honey from wild bee hives was practiced by primitive man and is still continued in some parts of Africa. Today, people harvest honey in artificial hives. Movable as well as fixed hives are created artificially as beehives. Suitable beehives with square, rectangular and hexagonal cells are created to attract bees and hives are created by them. Langstroth invented the movable bee hive with sliding frames. This facilitated domestic beekeeping better because one could inspect each and every frame without harming the bees or the comb cells.
What’s inside?
Inside every beehive there is a queen who is the mother of all female workers and male drones. A series of consecutive mating with the male drones fertilize the queen. The females do the work of collecting the honey from its surroundings and the males make their hives and protect the queen.
Bee Commercials
Bee commercials are highly valuable in today’s market. From bee wax to fermented honey, nearly every product of a bee is useful. Whether it is used as lipstick, candle, massage wax and Ayurvedic medicines bee wax has a great value.
Being an excellent gift of god, bees must be conserved. Modern storage, equipment and processing have made beekeeping more advanced and easy for the potential market to be tapped.
