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Nerdy Jobs: Beekeeping, Middle 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. Another word for a beekeeper is apiarist (AY-pee-uh-rist).
  • A workdayBee Country is a family bee farm in Darien Center, New York. The beekeepers there raise their own queen bees and collect honey. They also build small starter hives to sell. Each starter hive holds two frames of honey and pollen and three frames of growing baby bees.
  • TrainingBeekeepers learn by working with bees and by taking classes. Cornell University has a beginner program for people with 0 to 2 years of beekeeping. Its Master Beekeeping Program asks for at least 3 years first.
Beehives in an apiary, with an electric fence around them to keep bears out
A library is a place for books, and library ends in the same -ary.

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

Honey is much thicker and sweeter than flower nectar.

How do honey bees turn flower nectar into honey?

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

Worker bees change jobs, and the job depends on what the colony needs.

What do worker bees do when the colony runs short of food?

A clear glass jar filled with dark honey

Some store honey has cheap sugar syrup mixed in, but the label still says honey.

How does honey mixed with syrup hurt beekeepers who sell pure honey?

A bee on a yellow dandelion flower

A Bee Country beekeeper names goldenrod and buckwheat as flowers the farm’s honey comes from.

Why would planting more flowers help honey bees and wild bees?

Close-up of a honeycomb filled with honey

Honey bees keep the brood, or baby bees, in the middle of the hive. Honey, nectar and pollen fill the cells around the brood.

Why do honey bees keep the brood in the middle of the hive?

A beekeeper holding a hive frame covered in bees

Where should a beekeeper start when looking through a hive?

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

Lesson complete

Today’s word

apiary

AY-pee-er-ee

A place where bees are kept in hives.

Back to the lessonStart over
Up nexteradicateSterile flies vs. the screwworm
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