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Nerdy Jobs: Beekeeping, High school

A honey bee drinking nectar from a flower in a garden in Washington, D.C.

Honey bees make honey from nectar, the sugary water inside flowers. Each honey bee carries nectar home inside her body.

Is honey a kind of bee vomit?

I WAS A BEEKEEPER for a day!

Dr. Raven Baxter spends a day as a beekeeper at Bee Country, a family bee farm in New York. She and her co-host, Annika Salzberg, look inside the hives with the Werner family. The episode shows how bees make honey and beeswax, how beekeepers check a hive, and how people can help honey bees and native bees.

A beekeeper in protective gear tending bees in an apiary in Indiana

Meet the scientist

The beekeepers at Bee Country

  • JobBeekeeper, also called an apiarist (AY-pee-uh-rist).
  • A workdayBee Country is a family-owned bee farm in Darien Center, New York. Its beekeepers graft and raise their own queens and make hundreds of nucleus colonies, or nucs, each spring. A nuc is a starter colony with two frames of honey and pollen and three frames of brood, the growing young bees. The farm also harvests raw honey. Its bees stay in New York year-round and are not trucked south.
  • TrainingBeekeepers learn on the job and in courses. Cornell University offers a beginner program for people with 0 to 2 years of beekeeping. Its Master Beekeeping Program takes 15 months, asks for at least 3 years of experience and ends with exams at Cornell’s Dyce Lab for Honey Bee Studies.
Beehives in an apiary, with an electric fence around them to keep bears out
A library and an apiary share the -ary ending. Library comes from Latin librārius, “of books.”

Your word of the day is

AY-pee-er-ee

api-beefrom Latin apis
-arya place forfrom Latin -ārium

A place where bees are kept in hives.

Close-up video of honey bees crawling over a wax honeycomb

Nectar is about 20 to 60% sugar, and stored honey is about 80% sugar.

How do honey bees turn watery nectar into honey the colony can store for the long term?

Close-up video of bees gathering nectar from yellow flowers on a sunny day

Worker bees change jobs depending on what the colony needs, and they switch to foraging sooner when food runs short.

How does switching jobs by need help a honey bee colony survive?

A clear glass jar filled with dark honey

Rice syrup costs about 0.40 to 0.60 euros per kilogram, and imported honey averaged about 2.17 euros per kilogram in 2021.

How does syrup sold as honey hurt beekeepers who sell pure honey?

A bee on a yellow dandelion flower

A nuc holds two frames of honey and pollen and three frames of brood.

Why does a new honey bee colony need both stored food and young bees to survive?

Flowers planted for pollinators in a field at a farm in Caldwell, Idaho

Claim, evidence, reasoning

A beginner’s nuc of about 6,000 bees has to grow toward a full colony of about 60,000 and store honey for winter.

Which evidence from the episode shows that a growing honey bee colony needs many flowers?

A squash bee, a wild bee, on a squash blossom

Claim, evidence, reasoning

In the episode, Annika says honey bees aren’t native to the US. New York State has over 400 species of native bees.

Which evidence from the episode shows that a wildflower strip helps more bees than honey bees?

A blue orchard bee pollinating a zinnia flower

Claim, evidence, reasoning

Which reasoning links the evidence to the claim about the wildflower strip?

Golden honey dripping from a wooden dipper into a glass jar

Going further: honey fraud

In 2021 and 2022, European Union inspectors tested 320 shipments of imported honey at the border. They flagged 147 shipments as suspected of having added sugar syrup.

Where the honey came fromShipments flaggedShipments testedPercent flagged
China6689
Turkey1415
United Kingdom1010
All shipments147320
Stacks of cargo containers and cranes at a busy shipping port in Hong Kong

European Union inspectors flagged 147 of 320 imported honey shipments.

In the European Union honey check, ____ of all 320 shipments were flagged.

See the table
Where the honey came fromShipments flaggedShipments testedPercent flagged
China6689
Turkey1415
United Kingdom1010
All shipments147320
A jar of honey with a piece of honeycomb

In the European Union honey check, which place had the highest percent of shipments flagged?

See the table
Where the honey came fromShipments flaggedShipments testedPercent flagged
China6689
Turkey1415
United Kingdom1010
All shipments147320
A scientist uses a pipette at a US Department of Agriculture bee lab in Baton Rouge, Louisiana

The tests found chemical markers of added sugar but could not measure how much syrup was in the honey.

Why do European Union inspectors call the flagged honey shipments “suspected” instead of “fake”?

See the table
Where the honey came fromShipments flaggedShipments testedPercent flagged
China6689
Turkey1415
United Kingdom1010
All shipments147320
Close-up of a honeycomb filled with honey

A Bee Country beekeeper explains that bees make beeswax from honey they eat.

Which path traces beeswax back to the flowers the bees visited?

A beekeeper holding a hive frame covered in bees

The beekeeper and a University of Nebraska beekeeping guide both say bees eat about 8 pounds of honey to make 1 pound of wax.

To build 2.5 pounds of new wax comb, bees would eat about ____ of honey.

Fresh produce and flowers for sale at a farmers market in Washington, D.C.

Lesson complete

Today’s word

apiary

AY-pee-er-ee

A place where bees are kept in hives.

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Sources
  1. Alexandra-Maria Klein, Bernard Vaissière, James Cane, Ingolf Steffan-Dewenter, Saul Cunningham, Claire Kremen and Teja Tscharntke, led from the University of Göttingen in Germany, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2007
  2. Ashley Mortensen, Daniel Schmehl and Jamie Ellis, University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS), “European Honey Bee, Apis mellifera Linnaeus and subspecies,” EDIS fact sheet EENY568
  3. The Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium (MAAREC), a group of university beekeeping extension programs hosted by the University of Delaware, “The Colony and Its Organization”
  4. Shelby Kittle, Louise Lynch-O’Brien, Autumn Smart and Judy Wu-Smart, University of Nebraska–Lincoln Department of Entomology, “Beekeepers’ Guide to Comb Honey Production,” Nebraska Extension NebGuide G2362, March 2025
  5. Susan Nicolson, Hannelie Human and Christian Pirk, University of Pretoria in South Africa, Scientific Reports, 2022
  6. Kenya Fernandes, Dee Carter and four co-authors, University of Sydney in Australia, Frontiers in Nutrition, 2022
  7. Adam Siegel, Kim Fondrk, Gro Amdam and Robert Page, Arizona State University, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 2013
  8. The European Commission’s food fraud team and its Joint Research Centre, EU coordinated action “From the hives”, results published 2023
  9. The 6-to-8-pound range for honey per pound of wax: Kevin Palmer and Paula Rogers Huff, “Hand-Rolled Beeswax Candle,” University of Wisconsin-Extension, 2012
  10. Vision and Change core concepts and competencies, as summarized in Brownell and others, CBE Life Sciences Education, 2014
  11. Bee Country pages: home, About Us, contact, why a guarantee
  12. Beekeeper training from Cornell CALS, Beekeeping Courses & Certifications
  13. Word origins from Dictionary.com: apiary, apiarist, -ary, nucleus, library, binary, melliferous, mellifluous
  14. Spanish and French words from Wiktionary: abeja, abeille, apicula