My youngest - and the only one still with me, sigh - is asking about beekeeping for a high school club/activity. We’ve got some space in the back we don’t really use so it could happen.
On the other hand, we live in a relatively new development and the greenery - other than grass - is kind of limited. How will bees survive in this sort of very hot - South Carolina - environment. Can they wander far enough?
Anyone keep bees and clue me in? I’d be grateful.
I’m starting beekeeping this year. I just finished a class on it given by the local beekeepers association. The startup costs aren’t cheap, for a hobby that may last a year or two before college. (For two hives, including frames, about $600. Various kit - bee jacket, smoker, hive tool, etc., another $100 - $150. Two boxes of bees for the hive, $300.) The failure rate, especially for beginners, is quite high. I’m in TN, and people do successfully keep bees in the South.
StG
How much space? You want the hives a long way from people.
There’ll be more than you think. There will be weeds everywhere, for instance. And bees will range 2 miles from the hive, sometimes more.
But it sounds more like she should be helping someone rather than having her own hives.
For the past few years my gf has had a bee in her bonnet about beekeeping. Last week she attended a class, and she’s been rereading her books. Meanwhile, I quietly hold my breath and hope it passes.
How do you deal with sting exposure while beekeeping? I’ve been stung a couple of times just living my life, and I’ve developed anaphylaxis to honey bee stings. Do beekeepers face similar hazards?
Being stung is an occupational hazard. But beekeepers wear sting-proof suits.
Eh let’s call them sting resistant.
We started when I was in elementary school. Mom and I took a series of weekend classes and started a single hive on friend’s property. It’s a great experience for kids, although they’ll need an adult to help lift all the heavy stuff.
We we’re lucky and able to get a free centrifuge (and hives) from someone who didn’t want them any more. We’re still using that centrifuge, although we took the hand crank off and power it electronically.
Yeah, I’m not sure how I feel about this. I’d rather keep bees than rabbits or something for 4-H. And I’m told bees can use the help so I’d feel good about it.
Still, call me a fence-sitter on this one.
I do not, but people assume I do.
A few people locally keep bees in their backyards. This is in American suburbia, single family homes on small lots (maybe 50’ x 150", something like that"?). Maybe large operations need a lot of space, but smaller ones can get by with a lot less.
As for the outside temperature and how bees handle heat … some people locally who keep bees keep an old junky car on their property expressly for the purpose of letting bees take over some portion of the car’s interior. Essentially, they use the car as kind of a honey-production hive. I’ve never seen that hive-car set-up, so I’m not sure how it all works. One of these hive-car people brings their honey to a local farmer’s market every week. She said something about the temperature 140 F, how the interior of cars in our sun easily reaches that temperature, and how it facilitates honey production somehow. I’m missing a lot of details about it.
100’ away is fine. You need space for the bees to fly up. Putting hedging in front of the hive helps force them do that too.
If you look at hives in the wild, they’re in trees so generally shaded. If you get a lot of sun, then putting the hives in a shady spot is a good idea.
I had up to six hives at one time in my backyard.
The equipment was expensive, and it was time-consuming. I also didn’t have a honey extractor (centrifuge) and had to pay someone to do it. And I was dealing with Varroa mites all the time. 
I ended up giving away all the hives and equipment. I don’t miss it.
Taras Kul (aka Crazy Russian Hacker)did a vlog covering his attempt at beekeeping. He had lots of ups and downs. It is definitely worth watching a few of his early beekeeping videos.
Yes, a beekeeping suit is an excellent investment. But just make sure it is really a beekeeping suit. 
Heh.
I know people who keep multiple hives in a tiny city back yard, or on a garage roof. You don’t need much space at all.
The important thing is to have a barrier between them and people likely to panic, or, in some cases, steal the hive. If they fly upwards to go over a barrier, they don’t tend to come back down until they need to, so a fence over your height will normally push the flight path up so it’s not a problem, even if the space used is small. Regarding sun, bees are very good at dealing with higher temperatures so long as they have water, and while some shade in the hottest part of the day isn’t a bad plan, the earlier they get to warm up in the morning the better, so morning sun is ideal.
The major quantity of nectar most honeybees collect, maybe surprisingly, comes from trees, not what we normally think of as flowers. Round here lime trees (not the citrus, the other one) are far and away the biggest nectar source.
Regarding bees needing help, that’s… probably not a great reason to get a hive, especially if you’re not really interested. Hobby hives kept by people who skip maintenance and don’t really know much has been implicated as one of the major disease risks for honeybees, which, after all, are not native to the Americas. The species that really need help are the native bees, and honeybees seem to outcompete many native species, keeping honeybees actually seems to reduce the local native bee population.
As an ex-beekeeper in a suburban environment (4 backyard hives in the Midwest), I have some experience. Not recently, but have stings changed much in the last 60 years?
You never become immune to stings, but unless you have an extreme allergy, they aren’t all that problematical. I generally dispensed with bee veils (too clumsy), although I used gloves, long sleeves and long pants, and had a hive tool handy just in case (you want to quickly scrape off a sting, not pull it). Only once did I regret not wearing a veil – that was when I noticed, in my innocence, that on a rainy day, the bees appeared somewhat dormant, so I began some hive work. I learned that “dormant” is relative, and rainy days are the worst days to open a hive. Took me about a dozen stings to find out – quite a learning curve, no?
Speaking as the son of a beekeeper, space is good. You want to enjoy doing other things in your yard, don’t you? But yes, if you have them on the roof, they’re already flying high.
Space is nice, but it’s not necessary.
I used to have a vegetable bed less than a meter away from my old hive, I just had a dirt cheap bamboo fence around it, and I never got stung when I was just doing stuff nearby, even when cutting the grass.