How To Raise Hunny

If you would like to start beekeeping as a hobby or as a home-based business, you ought to decide which kind of honeybees to purchase. Honeybees domesticated in Europe and in North of the USA all belong to the few subspecies of the Apis mellifera, or Western Honeybee.

Some honeybee breeding companies selectively breed and hybridize subspecies of the Western Honeybee to create sought after qualities like disease and parasite resistance, good honey production, reduced swarming, prolific breeding, and gentleness.

Honeybees in North of the USA are mostly descendants of bees brought from Europe by early settlers in the 1600s. These bees adapted fine to environment in North of the USA, and these days both the wild and domesticated honeybee colonies in the United States are descendants of European honeybees.

Also Read: How to raise your own honey bees

European settlers also brought bees to South of the USA, but they didn't adapt as well to the tropical climate there. Domesticated European honeybees in most South American countries require intensive managed. Because of this, in 1956, researchers imported honeybees from Africa into Brazil. The African bees grew and started colonizing South the USA and hybridizing with European honeybees to produce what is known today as the 'Africanized' honeybee.

Africanized honeybees soon started to displace the European bees and to spread, and today every country in South and Central the USA has established populations of these honeybees.

Africanized honeybees got to the country the United States in October 1990 and have interbred with European honeybees. This assortment of honeybee will be considerably more aggressive and protective of its hives than the European honeybee, causing a level of concern among U.S. farmers and beekeepers.

The most common European bee in the United States is the non aggressive 'Italian honeybee'. The benefits of this sort of bees are gentleness, high honey yield, low swarming tendency and realistic disease opposition. An undesirable feature of Italian honeybees is that they retain larger populations within the hive in the winter and thus need larger amounts of winter stores.

Also Read: How to start raising bees

The 'Russian honeybee' is other honeybee variety that is raised in the U.S., they are non aggressive, reasonably disease resistant and capable to sustain both hot and cold temperatures.

The spine of the honeybee culture in the U.S. is the European honeybee which apparently has started vanishing at a rapid and alarming rate. Some people think that the Africanized honeybee might "... someday be the salvation of our U.S. beekeeping industry." In parts of the Southwestern United States today, beekeepers are already successful in raising Africanized honeybees.

You too can get started today with beekeeping by getting my step by step guide to beekeeping for a beginner beekeeper......

 Click Here For Complete Guide To Beekeeping >>>