BillNOVA
Dryer sheet aficionado
Anyone out there tried bee keeping? Talked with a friend, bought a book and am thinking about putting one in the backyard. If you have been keeping bees, what are the good and bad about it. Thanks
The good: Free moonshine? Just kidding.
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Once you distill it, no. It would then be some sort of brandy or spirit. Some vodka is distilled fermented beets. So a vodka made from mead would be distilled fermented honey. All the beets or honey or corn or grapes or apples or whatever do is serve as sugar for the yeast, and that fermented product serves as as input to the still.Wouldn't it actually be mead?
Amethyst
It was really fun, hiking through the forest to capture swarms, re-queening, etc.
It probably will be even more fun and rewarding if the swarms came from your neighbor's hives. Another person's loss is your gain.
Stoopid question: can I do this in my yard in the burbs? There is no regulatory/ermit issue (people can keep a goat, fergawdsakes).
Unless your property is such that you can place the hive 3 miles from each boundary, considering all the who-knows-what the county/town, neighbors, lawn contractors, etc. might be spraying, I wouldn't chance consuming the honey (and my conscience wouldn't let me sell it to anyone else).
Yes, and usually worse. My bees mainly worked blackberries, which no one bothers to spray. And commercially one of the big sources in most places is clover and sweet clover, and down south, orange groves. Good stuff. Commercial bee keepers often get paid both for pollination by the growers, and then sell the honey. It is hard physical work that requires a lot of travel too.Umm, wouldn't this be an issue for pretty much any commercial honey?
(snip)It probably will be even more fun and rewarding if the swarms came from your neighbor's hives. Another person's loss is your gain.
Umm, wouldn't this be an issue for pretty much any commercial honey?
Google: pesticides in honey
So the person that captures the swarm gains, but the person whose hive the swarm came from does not lose, at least not permanently. They still have their own colony, but honey production goes down temporarily until the number of bees in the old hive recovers. And if you catch a swarm that came from a feral hive, nobody loses at all.
When the larvae metamorphose into queens, the first one out of the pupa opens the other cells and kills the rival queens. She then becomes the new queen of the part of the colony that remained at the original hive.