I’m writing an article and I’m just not sure which is correct to use. They have the hives in their backyard and harvest the honey-My money is on “keep” as in “beekeeper.”
Both “keeping bees” and “raising bees” get a fair number of Google hits. My gut feeling would also be in favour of “keeping” - partially because the person who does it is a beekeeper, partially because, semantically, I’d think “raising” implies that the person who does the raising plays a role in the reproduction of the animals, such as by selecting the ones that mate.
Then again, I’m not a native speaker of English, so my gut feeling may very well be wrong. Incidentally, my native language, German, has a dedicated word root for the activity of keeping bees, and the person who does it (imkern as the verb, Imker for the person). It’s not used for anything else. I’ve always found it remarkable that English, which in my experience has a larger vocabulary than German, doesn’t have a dedicated word there but rather uses a compound word, something which is very common in German but not done in this case. Perhaps it tells you something about the importance of bees and honey for ancient Germanic tribes.
Fascinating! I also just wasn’t sure how to Google it.
I simply searched for “keeping bees” and “raising bees”. Both terms will yield hobbyist sites with advice on how to do it if you want to get into it, so I suppose both terms are used within the community.
As a former beekeeper, I kept bees, I didn’t raise them. They raised themselves.
But word styles change. When I was in school, we had P.E. or phys ed (fiz ed). Now they have phy ed (fiy ed). It used to be math class, now it’s maths class.
Ask yourself: have you ever heard of someone called a “beeraiser”?
English has the word apiarist, which matches Imker.
You’re absolutely right.
Trivia question: Name the most famous beekeepers, both in fiction and non-fiction.
Fiction: Sherlock Holmes
Non-fiction: Sir Edmund Hillary
You keep bees, and for only as long as you do right by them. They’re perfectly capable of saying “Later!” and zooming off to more salubrious climes if you displease them. I don’t think there’s any delusion of ownership over a hive, when it comes right down to it. Beekeeping is a partnership, not an ownership.
I know you didn’t mean this comment about lack of ownership in bees in a technical sense, but when I was in law school in Germany, I was taught, like generations before me, about a series of provisions in the German civil code governing ownership in bees, and what happens, in property law terms, when a colony swarms or leaves. The practical relevance of these provisions is nil, but they’re very picturesque, and that’s what has made them a classic in introductory civil law courses.
Tell me this isn’t a trend in the U.S., like automatically serving “sweet tea”.
Huh. Never heard “maths class” in the US. My two school age children call it “math class.” I only know “maths” in non-US American dialects of English. (I’ve also not heard “phy ed,” but that I’m not sure of, as my kids just call it “gym.”)
That is a bizarrely charming factoid, thanks for that! 
You don’t need to raise bees, they have little wings for that.
He drove the Mach Five:
Go, Bee Raiser
Go, Bee Raiser
Go, Bee Raiser
Gooooooo!
(I’m sorry, I have a cold.)
Never heard either of these in the US.
Talk to me. I have a weird fascination with this (?). I’d like to do it as a way of making the world a better place, I guess. Not looking to make money. Could you do it, say, on a quarter acre lot?
My dad kept bees at some point before I was born. Just a couple of bee boxes at the back of our property, practically in the middle of nowhere. They likely pollinated the neighboring cornfields as well as Mom’s flowerbeds and berry plants.
Someone in law enforcement made Dad get rid of the bee boxes, we believe the cop had enough of the sting operation.
Science can’t explain it!