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How to keep honey bees in your backyard

…we discussed the lack of pollinating insects in my backyard. One possible solution is honeybees. But another possibility is bumblebees.

Honeybees have a couple of problems for the home beekeeper. A strong hive can contain 50,000 insects or more, which can make a hive a bit dangerous if it gets disturbed. There’s also a number of diseases that honeybees can get, ranging from mites to colony collapse disorder. Plus a honeybee hive requires some maintenance. All of that is fine if you want to produce honey. But if you don’t, a honeybee hive might be more trouble than it’s worth.

That’s where bumblebees come in. Bumblebees build much smaller hives, usually in the ground. You might not even know there is a bumblebee hive around, because the number of bees is much smaller in a bumblebee hive and the hive is usually completely invisible, with just a small hole in the ground giving access. This video shows you a typical hive, in this case on display at a science museum (the queen is huge, and on the right):

Here is how a bumblebee hive gets started in the wild:

It turns out it is possible to create artificial hives for bumblebees to increase their numbers. One possibility is to buy a bumblebee hive, as shown here:

Or you can make one yourself:

An interesting perspective on bumblebee queens:

See also: Bumblebees in flight, tracked by radar, behave in fascinating ways

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