https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_honey
careful what you let your bees eat

or store or something

luxury skill

Japstrats

Welcome to the club. Good luck getting bees to start with. Been impossible since covid. Good luck keeping them alive if you do. Monsanto's chemical empire killing hives left and right.

Yeah, honey is pretty great. I can't say I've ever had any fancy stuff from farmer's markets or anything, but I've thought about beekeeping as a "maybe someday thing" since bees are so useful to have around not just for your own garden but the entire environment around you. Unfortunately, bees haven't been doing too well these days and they need all the help they can get.
Maple syrup is usually the sweetener than I use since it's far less thick and easier to combine with stuff.

>>2798
>Welcome to the club
I wish I could say I'm coming in soon, but I'm still a couple years out from getting any. Can't do anything with the current area I live in and need to wait until I can move into a larger property where I don't need to worry about pesky rules against having anything that promotes self sufficiency. Sucks about the Monsanto thing, my local bee farm has been trying to do some work to help preserve native honeybees, but it doesn't seem like the government is that interested in going after the big companies killing pollinators. At the very least they're trying small conservation efforts, https://sherrill.house.gov/media/press-releases/sherrill-leads-bipartisan-bicameral-efforts-to-prevent-flooding-and-protect-pollinators-through-the-use-of-native-plants. And maybe with the billions they're being sued for there might be an impact on that shit company, but I have my doubts. Another thing I've seen is that more than just chemicals there's a real issue of imported mites being a danger towards honey bee populations too.

If I get a nice large plot of land with enough space between houses, do you think that'd work well enough to maybe prevent them from traveling into the chemical zone of other people's gardens? Also is getting bees more about getting the right Queen to start up a hive or is it more getting the hive itself? I know that people can buy Queens for their hives, but not sure if that's a thing for starting hives with few drones or if you need to import an entire hive at first.

Speaking of Queens, I found them to be pretty interesting. They control the births of and manage the entire population of the hive and the bees are all extremely loyal to her. Unlike normal bees that live around a few weeks, the Queens will live for years and is the only one capable of producing another Queen. Kinda curious how those lifespans work, especially since it's just a difference in larval diet that determines whether a female bee becomes a worker or a Queen. They make a cool piping sound too sometimes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBqUz0o3mQg (speaking of ballsy in the op, I can't imagine doing this myself without any protective gear, guess you just get used to it with time), from what I've heard it's when they're virgins or in the presence of other Queens. And when they are in the presence of another Queen that's birthed apparently they tend to fight to the death for control of the hive, which I guess makes sense but you'd think that multiple Queens would be somewhat efficient for a hive. Not that you'd see this that often though, since from what I've heard from a few people that have worked their own hives they tend to just kill the Queen before it spawns a new one then replace it with a new Queen, such that the potential for bad genetics is low. Though this does introduce a significant risk factor where the hive might end up not accepting the new queen and trying to ball her to death https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXVVOn5uZCY. Kinda curious if the genetics issue is so much that you really have to worry about the hive making new ones of their own, however.

I'd like to talk about propolis too, but I'll probably want to look into that more before spouting off like I know much about it.

qu[s |][/s]ean bees

>HIV
aaaa kimoooo
the part about using it (honey, not AIDS) as a sweetener made me look it up the comparison since it's still 80% sugar and it seems it has both a lower glycemic index (i.e. it's processed more slowly, more stably) and tastes sweeter due to a different composition (meaning you'd require less to achieve similar results) so that's actually pretty neat, you know, going beyond the vague notion of "natural is healthier" or whatever
it's definitely an underrated skill compared to those of other historical food sources, you can find some surprisingly accurate depictions in many manuscripts and once more it's the sort of thing we can trace back all the way to ancient greece or egypt:
https://livebeekeeping.com/history-of-beekeeping/beekeeping-ancient-greece/
i happen to have a biologist aunt who's worked with bees a lot, although not in the apiary sense but measuring their population and activities in the wild and all that jazz, it's pretty cool
>>2802
>propolis
i've eaten this as candy
eusocial queens truly reach an insane level of specialization and it's no wonder so few species have ever developed them
you need some really fucking solid structure to make them work and i really should look into hypothesis as to their origin
>>2803
queens have ALL the sex albeit