Karl Falster presents the basics of the honey bee, and the keeping of honey bees. What they are like, how to get started and how to enjoy bee keeping.

1. From the Falster Farm
Perspective that is . . .
www.falsterfarm.com

2. Karl & Nancy Falster
Today I’m hoping I can transfer a few
things I have learned about the honey
bee and a bit about how honey bees
live in our part of North America.
If this is your first time to meet us, we
are a small family farm practicing the
old methods of slow growing and slow
cooking in the Nourishing Traditions
style. Keeping bees was 1st a hobby,
then an avocation, in fact I have been
playing with bees since 1979.
Like many farms of the pre-1950’s we also keep a few stands of bees on our farm. Our
hobby farm went wild in 2003 as Falster Farm went international with it’s Miniature
Hereford and mini Jerseys. As part of our farming practice we raise our beeves on
pasture and finish them on clover – East Texas Ball clover. Customers visiting would see
our Honey Bees following the mini Herefords finishing on clover; so, 1st we were selling
honey on the farm, then a short class or two, some consultation calls, then a class on
Mead making, Farmers Market, and then a couple of retail outlets.

3.  We even remove bees from structures. This
has been a most interesting year for that.

4.  Also, I am a Bee Hunter, and that’s been a part of my
whole life.

5.  Agricultural Propagation/Pollination of Fruits & Veggies
 Table Honey on Biscuits, Breads, Pan Cakes, Cereals – just plain old honey
 Health Supplements
• 1. Relieve Hangovers. Had a little too much fun last night? A few tablespoons of honey, which is packed with fructose, will help speed up your body’s
metabolism of alcohol.
• 2. Heal Wounds, Cuts, Scrapes & Burns. Don’t reach for the Neosporin the next time you cut or burn yourself — simply apply honey to the affected area.
Honey works as a natural antiseptic.
• 3. Soothe Sore Throats and Coughs. Combine honey with the juice of one lemon and drink. It works like a wonder!
• 4. Remove Parasites. Hopefully you’ll never have to use this trick, but if you do, combine equal parts honey, vinegar and water and drink. The combination
of these three ingredients is the perfect parasite killer
• 5. Moisturize Dry Skin. Honey is a fantastic moisturizer, especially on dry patches, like your elbows or hands — even your lips! Rub onto your dry, patchy
skin and let it sit for about 30 minutes before washing off. Honey also makes a great lip balm!
• 6. Condition Damaged Hair. Honey is a great natural conditioner. You can simply add a teaspoon of the stuff to your regular shampoo to smooth your
damaged locks. You can also combine it with olive oil for a deeper conditioning. Let it soak for 20 minutes with your hair wrapped in a towel before
shampooing as usual.
• 7. Have an Amazing Bath. Relax your body and soak your skin in a soothing bath. Add 2 tablespoons of honey to 1 cup of hot water and let it dissolve for
about 10 minutes. Add 2 or 3 drops of lavender Young Living essential oil and add it to your bath.
• 8. Remove Acne. Stubborn acne can really benefit from a small daily dab of honey. Place a band-aid over the pimple, and take it off 30 minutes later.
• 9. Give Yourself a Facial. Combine 2 teaspoons of milk with 2 tablespoons of honey. Cover your face with the mixture
and let it sit for 10 minutes before washing off.
• 10. Boost Your Energy. Quit turning to coffee for your daily energy boost! Replace your cup of Joe with a cup of tea.
Mix in a tablespoon or so of honey.
• 11. Substitute Honey for Sugar in Baking. For every cup of sugar a recipe calls for, replace it with 3/4 cup of honey.
For best results, add 1/4 teaspoon of baking soda and reduce another liquid in your recipe by 1/4 cup. Also, reduce the oven
temperature by 25 degrees.
• 12. Make Infused Honeys. Why have plain old regular honey when you can have ginger lime honey or hot pepper honey?!
• 13. Make Almond Milk from Scratch.
• 14. Make Honey Wine from Scratch . . . The Alcoholic Beverage of the Ages – MEAD!

6. Bees Constitute a number of families with some 20,00 species.
They possess the most astonishing knowledge of engineering
and architecture in the animal kingdom, stand out from many other creatures in terms
of their social lives, and amaze all who study their means of communication.
Life in the colony, much more so than ants and wasps, is based on successfully
cooperating with the other bees in the hive. Unlike almost all other creatures their
sexuality is very much repressed.
With honey bees it is always the case that very few females (Queens) take care of the
propagation of the species. So the love of all the bees is focused on that one individual and
her messages to them – messages that direct the general aspect of the colony.
The worker bee goes to the love life of the plant kingdom (flowers) and carries that love
which lives in the flowers into the hive. Therefore, the living element of this thriving,
germinating love that is spread out over the flowers of the fields is also contained in the
honey that the bees make and we eat or drink.
Life in the hive is a life lived in twilight, a life of security and desire for union and
oneness in seclusion. The worker’s short life accomplishes cleaning and warming brood,
feeding of others, producing wax, building comb, transporting food within the hive, guard
duty at the entrance, visiting the flowers of the field and sucking up nectar into their honey
stomach and regurgitating it when she returns to the hive, then communicating to others
where that nectar or pollen source resides in relation to the current position of the sun – the
cosmos.

7. Three types of Individuals:
Queen
TYPICAL
COLONY
1 Queen Workers
200 – 80,000
Workers
0 – 5000
Drones
Drones

8.  We observe that the Honey Bee is a creature more directly
influenced by the sun than any other.
 There are three types of bees with three different time
periods of development to maturity: 16 days for the Queen,
21 days for the Worker, 22 – 24 days for the Drone.
 The sun needs as much time to rotate on its axis as it takes
the drone to mature.
 The Queen on the other hand doesn’t wait a full rotation – she
stays completely within the realm of a single rotation. By
doing so, the queen places itself entirely under the influence
of the sun, which then allows it to become fertile egg
producing. So everything that is connected with the capacity
to lay fertilized honey bee eggs is under the influence of the
Sun, also in respect to the entire cosmos.
 The more the sun rotates to its complete rotation the more
the larvae is thrown toward the earth influence, such as the
worker, though very much a sun creature, it is closer to the
earth influence than the Queen.
 And , the Drone, maturing outside the complete Solar
rotation has freed itself of the Suns influence altogether.
 So we have three sorts of honey bees to look at – the Sun
Queen; the Worker, which still has some extra earthly powers;
and the Drone which has nothing at all of the Sun’s effects
and is completely an earth creature.
 Everything normally taking place with the honey bee is not
influenced by the earth – as you will see only fertilization.

9. Really hard to say as the elements are
so interdependent for form and
substance:
Colony in the round - formed from the
wax, nectar, pollen.
Six-Sided cells of workers and drones
most economical way to cover a given
space.
The queen lays her eggs in a circle.
The comb itself takes on a beautiful
heart shape which is under the influence
of the rounding law of hanging chains.

10. The round queen cell hanging
vertically from day one – fortified and
complemented by royal jelly
throughout the larval stage, are the
necessary components to make a real
queen.
She is the ruler of the dark domain, in
the most noble sense she is a servant
all her life. Usually mates once
accumulating enough semen to last
several years, producing many 100’s of
thousands offspring.
Italian Queen
and her court.

11.  Egg and first stage larva laid dead center
& Horizontal! Off center indicates a laying
worker and loss of the real queen. (This is
a good place for you to ask me a tough
question.)
 Larvae of different ages. The white
material in the bottom of the cell is food
secreted by adult workers.
 Older larvae with cells being capped
 Worker pupae - changing to the adult.
 An emerging adult.

12.  Born in a 6 sided
horizontal cell
 Are the bulk of the
colony’s population
 Suppress their sexuality
 Perform all duties and
labor for maintenance of
the colony
 Produces the wax that the
colony is built on.

13.  Nest (comb) construction: workers
build the comb which forms the
internal structure of the hive. The
comb is made from beeswax, a
natural secretion sweated out in
thin, wafer like, almost, translucent
white plates through glands on the
underside abdomen of worker
bees: that has been considered
sacred in almost every culture
throughout history.
 It takes nearly a million of these
platelets to make up a deep frame
of honeycomb – making it the most
valuable aspect of the hive.
 5-8 pounds of honey imbibed to
make a pound of wax!

14. Maintenance of the nest:
 Bees are careful about nest hygiene;
clean cells before reuse, and remove
debris and dead bees.
Fanning & Guards:
 Workers are responsible for
Environmental control.
 They will fan at the entrance to circulate
fresh air into the hive if carbon dioxide
levels get too high or if temperatures
rise above acceptable levels.
 Acceptable temps maintained by bees
are cold-blooded animals and lack
automatic control of their body
temperature. They have only behavioral
control of temperature, but nevertheless
maintain the hive at 90 F regardless of
the outside temperature! When too cold,
bees contract their flight muscles
repeatedly without moving their wings;
this behavior generates heat.
 They are ready to fend off ANY intruder.

15.  Most modern farmers think that animals and insects are just wondering generalities, but nothing could be
further from the truth. Bees know the smell of their colony and anything not imbibed with the smell of their hive
will be attacked . . . If an intruder smells foreign then it's likely that the bees in your hive will try to kill them by
balling up and smothering them to death, and /or stinging them. Be they mice, roaches, wasps, or the new
queen you want to introduce.
 They will then remove it from the hive, if too large they will move it to a corner and encase it in Propolis. . . The
casement gum of the hive imbibed with marvelous healing components for those who chew it.

16.  Pollenis carried on the hind legs of the
worker when foraging. Pollen is stored in
cells and serves as the source of proteins,
fats and minerals.

17.  Collection, Handling and Storage
of Food: Bees collect nectar and
pollen from flowers as food. Nectar
is carried internally in the honey
stomach. Pollen is picked up by
the special body hairs as a bee
visits a flower.
Nectar is converted into honey by
workers in the hive. When the
honey is ripe and the cells have
been filled, the workers cap the
cells with a wax capping.
Falster Honey is deep and golden

18. Labor Activities of Workers
How does a Bee know what to do?
How did the pupa turn into a bee? How did the growth stages of the bee first emerge? Who or what defined that
process? Was it the bee itself-or chance, as evolutionists would have us believe-or a more powerful force than
either of these?
The answer to these questions is clear. It is absurd to claim that the insect inside the cocoon could carry out the
necessary changes within itself, in full knowledge of what it will need in the outside world. It's totally out of the
question for the eye or digestive system, or substances such as enzymes and hormones, to form inside a pupa
that develops as a result of happenstance changes in itself. Neither can there be any question of an external
intervention in the pupa.
During the pupal stage, neither chance nor the bee itself enables the perfect completion of each of the bee's
organs, with all the functions they will require. Such a flawless development can only be performed by a
superior and matchless Power - God, who is matchless in creation.
Every bee emerges from the cell with all its bodily structures fully formed. Neither happenstance nor the bee itself
can bring this about.

19.  The Queen is the unique and most important
individual in the colony. The lady of six legs.
 The perfect formation of the wax is to a large part
directed by the Queen or the result of her genes.
 Clustering of brood and pollen is directed by the
Queen . . .

20.  Without the presence of a Queen a colony cannot
function normally.
• Disperse/abscond, or develop a laying queen situation.
 Observation of the Queens egg laying patterns
are an important part of beekeeping; one of the
basic goals of good management is to assess the
quality of the Queen, and to a degree control and
promote her.
• Queen Excluder
• Supplemental Feeding of Honey and Lemon Grass Oils
• BioDynamic Remedies

21. Supersedure is the process by which an
old queen bee is replaced by a new
queen. Supersedure may be initiated
due to old age of a queen or a diseased
or failing queen. As the queen ages her
pheromone output diminishes.
Supersedure may be forced by a
beekeeper.
When a new queen is available, the
workers will kill the reigning queen by
"balling" her, This method is also used to
kill large predatory wasps that enter the
hive and may be used against a foreign
queen attempting to take over an
 Develops from a fertilized egg or young existing colony. Balling is often a
problem for beekeepers attempting to
female larva (emergency Queen.) introduce a replacement queen.
 Queens are reared in special cells – If a queen suddenly dies the workers
will flood several cells, where a larva
round, not hexagonal – hanging has just emerged, with royal jelly. The
vertically, not horizontally. young larva floats on the royal jelly. The
worker bees then build a larger queen
 Queen larvae are fed a diet of ―Royal cell from the normal sized worker cell
Jelly‖ and it protrudes vertically from the face
 Cell capped on day 5, larva spins of the brood comb.
cocoon

22.  Completes development and emerges
after about 15 1/2 to 16 days after the egg
was laid.
 Announces her advent by a series of
piping notes (challenge, call to arms?)
 Seeks out rivals and cuts that rival’s cell, or
two emerging queens will fight to the
death. Yes both may die.
 Initiates mating flights at 5-6 days of age
She flies as high as she can so that only the strongest can get to
her.
Two Virgin Queens in Death Struggle

23.  Males: larger than workers, large eyes,
no stingers
 •Hatch from unfertilized eggs, reared in
larger cells, longer development time
(24 days)
 Only function is reproductive
 Reach sexual maturity at about 12 days
of age and initiate mating flights
 Virgin queens leave the hive to mate,
seeking males at drone congregation
areas. Mating occurs in flight. Drone
congregation areas remain stable over a
period of years.
 Drones not reared all year - only spring
and summer
 Number of drones dependent on colony
strength and condition
 Drones ―kicked-out‖ in Fall

24.  Well, before you get head over
heels involved in beekeeping just
remember you don’t have to buy
all the fancy stuff. Start out with the
minimal:
1. a beekeeping beginners class,
2. smoker,
3. hive tool,
4. hat and veil,
5. a hive with a super or two,
6. a package of bees,
7. and a proper sense of clarity and
calmness.
Things will probably go just as well
for you as a minimal beekeeper!
You’ll get the honey, the fun and
fascination.

25.  Successful beekeeping is more easy
when it is born in the classroom. 30 -
40 years ago, beekeeping was
easier since there were no mites,
small hive beetles, CCD etc.
 Now-a-days, an educated
beekeeper is a more successful
beekeeper. It is vital to attend a
beekeeping class taught by an
experienced beekeeper with good
credentials.
 AND, if available, attend and support
a bee keepers club.
 But remember most everyone has an
axe to grind in this hobby /
commercial enterprise. So keep
your mind open.

26. My Bees Know My Presence
Sense My Essence
They Can’t See Me – They Taste Me
Like Cattle Horses and Dogs

27.  There is
nothing sacred
about the hive
design.
 1st were tile
like made from
dung, pottery,
skips from Caped
woven straw, Honey
Brood
Nest

28.  Middle Tennessee Gums

29.  Modern Top Bar
Hives
 Andrew Harris
working his Top
Bar Hives in the
Shade.

30.  Thestandard
Langstroth bee
hive consists of
a variable
number of hive
bodies, wooden
frames to hold
comb, a bottom
board and a
cover.

31.  Purchase a package.
 You can catch a swarm, or

32.  The Modern Spinning Extractor replaced the
warm drip/gravity and squeeze sponge process.
 Keeps the wax useable for next round.
 Simplifies volume Yields of the honey, much less
messy . . . If that means anything to you.

33. Goes in the Top – Spins around –
comes out the Bottom . . .

34. Raw Unprocessed - All Natural - Honey
We use interesting bottles we can find.
Winnsboro Farmers Market
To make our Hobby Pay for Itself.

35. Cover um up,
These bees were upset? load um up,
Pompeii used them in move home.
war.

36. Saturday 3/28/09 7:55 PM Sunday 3/29/09 Frozen

37. 1.
2. 12/20/10 - Dusk
3 4.
.
My Original 1979 8 Frame
Cypress Hive Body
5.

38.  Knowing the natural rhythms of your bees is essential for staying safe. If you take
the time to consider a few things before working the hive, your bee work is bound
to be enjoyable.
 Choose a day that is bright, sunny and warm. High Barometric Pressure.
Thunderclouds or storms are to be avoided.
 Working the hive on a colder day can be dangerous for the bees. Honeybees begin
to cluster for warmth if the temperature drops below about 57 degrees.
 Getting to know your bees is essential. The mood of the bees changes from day to
day. If you open the hive and the bees seem agitated, lined up on the bars in guard
formation, you can always close the hive and come back another day.
 Has a car, lawn mower or weed eater been by recently to get them excited?
 Because scents and pheromones are so important to life in a bee colony, they also
are an easy way to cause a defensive response. When you’re on the way to visit your
bees, avoid fragrances (hair products, perfumes, aftershave or deodorant.)
 I use essential oils to calm myself down, and chewing tobacco. I move slow and
easy-like to keep a calm demeanor. I focus on the bees -- in my mind as well as my
body. I avoid being distracted by my wife and children.
 Stand out of the flyway. Let a little smoke get on you too, if they are flying on you.
 Use your hive tool and grip methodically. Use as little smoke as you need, lay it on
the frames – not blowing down the alleys. Calm, sure movements are best. Stay
relaxed. Don’t work too fast or with quick jerky movements. Bees are sensitive to
vibrations, so bumping or banging on the hive can set off their defensive response
 You are going to get stung . . . By accident or on purpose, always try to make it an
accidental occurrence.

39. From the Falster Farm
Perspective that is . . .
www.falsterfarm.com