Episode #3: How to Get Started with Beekeeping With Liz Beavis
In this episode of HobbyScool, I chatted with Liz Beavis all about beekeeping. Liz lives on a 250 acre property in Kumbia, Queensland, Australia, with her husband Pete and three dogs, in a second-hand house that they moved to the property and renovated over about four years. Over time they have developed a veggie garden, a food forest, and chicken tractors in electric fence netting.
They also have beehives and produce honey and beeswax. Liz uses the beeswax to make beeswax wraps, candles, leather dressing and chopping board polish. Liz also makes soap using only natural and sustainable ingredients, including locally-sourced hand-rendered beef tallow. This sustainable ingredient also makes a very hard, long-lasting bar of soap.
In the episode, we discussed how beginners can get started with beekeeping, who may want to consider beekeeping and the benefits of beekeeping for a home garden.
Links mentioned in this episode:
How you can find Liz: Eight Acres Website, Instagram, Facebook
Visit HobbyScool.com to get on the wait list for our next online learning summit.
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Transcript: How to Get Started with Beekeeping With Liz Beavis
00:00:02 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
And today my special guest is Liz, Beavis and Liz. We're going to be talking about how to get started with beekeeping for beginners and Liz. I'm super excited to chat with you today. This is a subject I know absolutely nothing about, and I know that the audience who are listening here are super interested in just the, you know, the beekeeping and how you know really what it is and how they could get started.
00:00:31 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
But before we get into all of these questions, can you tell the audience a little bit more about you, your business, and how you help people?
00:00:42 Liz Beavis (guest)
Oh hi destiny. Thank you for having me on the podcast, so I'm in Australia and I live on 258 acres.
00:00:54 Liz Beavis (guest)
And I'm just really passionate about growing my own food, so something that my husband and I want wanted to do. So we started off on a smaller property and we've gradually kind of built up to where we're here and 250 acres. And we've got. We've got beef cattle, dairy cows.
00:01:14 Liz Beavis (guest)
Chickens and chicken tractors. We've got our food forest and our veggie garden, and we've got bees, so that's all the ways that we grow our own food. And yeah, excited to talk to you about that.
00:01:32 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
So 250 acres. That sounds like a tremendous amount to keep up with. I can barely keep up with my little one acre here myself. So how? How is it is a lot of it pastureland? Or do you have a lot of trees on it? Is it hard to keep up with that much property?
00:01:52 Liz Beavis (guest)
Yeah, well, it's it's interesting because yeah, it's about 50% forest. So tall trees, gum trees, and then the rest of it's pasture. And because we have the cattle, I think we've got five or six panics that they the kettles sort of move between so they generally control the grass. So really all we have to do is maintain the fences so it's really not.
00:02:22 Liz Beavis (guest)
A lot more work because we really just have the kind of one or two acres around the house that we're using intensively, and then the rest of it's just cattle. That sort of look after themselves, so we actually use something called permaculture to help us to understand how to design and use the property, and that that was really helpful and it's sort of talks about having your most intensive.
00:02:52 Liz Beavis (guest)
Activities near the house and you kind of radiate out into different zones.
00:02:57 Liz Beavis (guest)
Where you don't have to work as hard, they sort of look after themselves.
00:03:04 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
So it's it sounds like in kind of listening to you describe it that you have really built you and your husband have really built yourself. You know a living area space, A farm where you're very self-sufficient. Do you ever have to go to the grocery store or do most of the food that your family eat? Is it coming from your property and your farm?
00:03:28 Liz Beavis (guest)
Alright.
00:03:31 Liz Beavis (guest)
I think it would be more than half of our food is coming from the property, and so there's there's always far as there's always things that you have to get from the supermarket, but generally we're self-sufficient for meat because we butcher the beef cattle and the chicken, and we have eggs from the chickens and then the garden always has something at different times of the year. You just ate whatever is growing, and so at the moment I've got peas and radishes.
00:04:01 Liz Beavis (guest)
Kyle and perennial lakes.
00:04:05 Liz Beavis (guest)
The one thing I haven't been able to grow is mushrooms and I really like mushrooms, so I definitely buy them.
00:04:11 Liz Beavis (guest)
And uhm, yeah, different times.
00:04:15 Liz Beavis (guest)
There's yeah different things that you need to buy, but I certainly we've had some situations where we've been flooded and we haven't been able to get off the property for a few days or even we had some really bad floods a few years ago and we were completely cut off from town for nearly a week and I felt pretty comfortable that we weren't going to starve. You don't always have what you necessarily want to eat, but you definitely have food here, so.
00:04:46 Liz Beavis (guest)
Uh, it's it's a good feeling knowing that we can grow what we need and not rely on supermarkets necessarily.
00:04:57 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
So so tell me, and today we're going to be talking about beekeeping, and that's the main topic that we're going to be focusing on here. How did you decide to get started in beekeeping and kind of what led you down that path? And kind of tell us how is that going today? What are you using the honey? And I'm sure there's I don't know. I don't know anything about it and I'm sure there's other other things that come out of that that you use it for. Can you tell us a little bit about that process?
00:05:26 Liz Beavis (guest)
Yes, so I I have to warn your listeners that once you get one beehive, it's very tempting to end up with 30 beehives. So which is what happened to us? And so we were just sort of interested in having a beehive to help with pollinating the garden.
00:05:47 Liz Beavis (guest)
And and you know, getting more vegetables and we didn't really know anything about bees. We just joined our local beekeeping club and there was someone there that.
00:06:00 Liz Beavis (guest)
I've said, yeah, come over and have a look at my base and we bought ourselves a basos and.
00:06:05 Liz Beavis (guest)
We started looking at at that guys and beehives to start to understand what to do and then we just bought lots of books and listened to lots of podcasts and then we bought our first five off that guy.
00:06:20 Liz Beavis (guest)
And the thing with behaves is you.
00:06:26 Liz Beavis (guest)
Can split them basically to make another hive. So we just started doing that and so you can split them or you can catch swarms so they they naturally once they have too many bees in the hive. Some of the bees will leave and then you can put them in a new hive and you can just keep making more hive. So we've been doing that and now we have 30 fives.
00:06:47 Liz Beavis (guest)
And we have as the honey, and we have a beeswax. So that's the main thing other other people can collect pollen. And yeah, there's there's other things you can do with bees, but that's the main one that's easy for us to do. So we've got a little extraction set up. And now, in our shared and we extract, I think last year we took about 200 kilograms, which I think is around £100.00 of honey.
00:07:18 Liz Beavis (guest)
And you know, just sell that locally and through my website and we've run out. So it's yeah, it's very popular.
00:07:28 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
And this may be an old wives tale. I'm not sure I have heard that if you buy local hummy you know honey that's been, you know, I guess made around your area. It helps with allergies. Is that true or do you know?
00:07:43 Liz Beavis (guest)
I I don't know if it's necessarily true. I've heard that I've heard the same thing, and it's because.
00:07:50 Liz Beavis (guest)
Because the honey that we make is unfiltered, so the honey that you buy from a big brand is is hated and filtered and and mixed up. You know so that they can get out all of the small particles because it's the small particles of pollen that make the honey crystallize. If you've ever seen honey that you've had for a long time, it will start to go kind of solid and the sugar crystals will crystallize.
00:08:20 Liz Beavis (guest)
Out of it and so to try and make it last longer.
00:08:26 Liz Beavis (guest)
Not that there's anything wrong with it. You can still eat it when it's like that, but people like it to be runny, so to make it stay runny, they heat it and filter for it and get all of those pollen particles out. And so really, you're just. You just have a dead product, whereas if you buy it straight from a beekeeper that hasn't done that, they've just filtered it cold and they haven't heated it. It will still have the pollen in it.
00:08:49 Liz Beavis (guest)
And then the ferry is that if you're eating local honey, you're getting exposed to that local pollen and that could help your allergies, so I don't know if it necessarily does, but also because their honey hasn't been heated. There's some enzymes and you know heat sensitive good things in that honey that haven't been affected, and I think it just tastes better because you're getting you're getting a unique honey that hasn't been.
00:09:20 Liz Beavis (guest)
Blended with a whole lot of other honeys to achieve a colour or you know something that the the big honey Packers are trying to achieve. So yeah, we definitely get a unique toast from our honey just because of all the trees on our property which the the ironic thing is, our property was relatively cheap.
00:09:40 Liz Beavis (guest)
To buy because it's got trees on it and people think the trees are, you know, a waste of space because they you can't grow as much grass for your cattle. But for us it's been perfect because we have all these trees that produce a unique honey that you know, people love it.
00:10:02 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
So you harvest the honey, but you said you also harvest the beeswax. May I ask what do you use the beeswax for?
00:10:10 Liz Beavis (guest)
The beeswax, so when you take a frame of honey you cut the the beeswax capping off.
00:10:19 Liz Beavis (guest)
To get the honey out and so we call that the cappings and then I can melt that down and filter it. And I have beeswax.
00:10:29 Liz Beavis (guest)
So I've been selling the beeswax, it's very popular and people buy it to make candles.
00:10:37 Liz Beavis (guest)
You can also use it to make a selves and bombs, so if you start with any oil and so say olive oil or.
00:10:49 Liz Beavis (guest)
Almond oil and you can infuse herbs into that oil and you can add a bit of beeswax and a bit of essential oils and so you can make some beautiful farms and selves for your skin. And so I do that as well and beeswax wraps. Have you heard of beeswax wraps?
00:11:11 Liz Beavis (guest)
Uh, so they're basically a replacement for glide wrap or cling wrap that you use for keeping your food fresh.
00:11:21 Liz Beavis (guest)
So what you do is you take a square of cotton fabric and you dip that in a mixture of beeswax and a few other things and you sort of pull it out and let the beeswax strip off and you end up with a a kind of flexible, slightly sticky wrap that you can use and you can reuse it.
00:11:47 Liz Beavis (guest)
That's a really great way to avoid all that plastic that you go through. If you're using a lot of clingfilm.
00:11:53 Liz Beavis (guest)
And it's it's really good for storing cheese and vegetables. Like if you cut open an avocado, you can wrap it up.
00:12:02 Liz Beavis (guest)
So I make them as well and I also make little blocks where people can make their own, so that's quite popular.
00:12:11 Liz Beavis (guest)
Umm?
00:12:12 Liz Beavis (guest)
And yeah, I think a lot of people buy the beeswax from me to do that as well.
00:12:18 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
And I was thinking about when I made my kids lunches this morning, I wrapped up their sandwiches and the Saran wrap. You know, the cling wrap and that that would probably that would be, I think more. I think that would be better for them, especially if you could reuse it.
00:12:32 Liz Beavis (guest)
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, only thing people buy them for their kids and sort of say well, I hope my kid brings it home from work from school and doesn't lose it.
00:12:43 Liz Beavis (guest)
That's yeah, my husband's been using it for his lunch as he wraps up his little Rep for lunch and.
00:12:51 Liz Beavis (guest)
Yeah, avoids all that plastic.
00:12:54 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
So you have gone from you went. You started with one on behalf and then grew up to the excuse me. 30 of them, that's a lot of if somebody was interested in getting started, what would you recommend? What? What would they need to do first?
00:13:13 Liz Beavis (guest)
So definitely find your local beekeeping club or a local beekeeper and and just go and learn as much as you can and and see if someone will show you.
00:13:27 Liz Beavis (guest)
Hive and the process because it.
00:13:31 Liz Beavis (guest)
There is a bit of work to do, so you do need to check on your base. You need to check them for diseases and pests.
00:13:39 Liz Beavis (guest)
And you need to judge or when they have enough honey, so even a lot of people are buying these flow hives. Have you have you seen the flow hives in America?
00:13:50 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
I don't know anything about it. I've never. I don't even know what you're.
00:13:52 Liz Beavis (guest)
Talking.
00:13:52 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
About is I, you know, I think.
00:13:54 Liz Beavis (guest)
The.
00:13:56 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
Right. The kind of the, you know, I don't know, it just looks like a, you know, would a wood box really? So what?
00:14:07 Liz Beavis (guest)
OK.
00:14:09 Liz Beavis (guest)
Yeah, that's the standard hive is is called a langstroth and it's just yeah, it's a box and it's got frames in it. It wooden frames and the the the base build their base wax on the frame and there's a couple of other designs that you can get, but something that's been really popular. It was an Australian invention, but I'm I'm sure I've seen American beekeepers using it. It's called a flow hive and people buy it and think oh this is going to be really easy because it's got to tap in the back.
00:14:38 Liz Beavis (guest)
And it cracked open all of the beeswax frames and you can extract the honey without having to pull all the frames out. But you still need to know what your bees are doing and how to inspect the bees. You can't just think you've got this box of bees sitting in the corner of your yard and you just walk out and get some honey. Sometimes so.
00:15:00 Liz Beavis (guest)
I just think it's it's really important no matter what class you want to use, that you spend some time with the beekeeping club and spend some time with the bees and just make sure that you're comfortable with it because it can be quite.
00:15:14 Liz Beavis (guest)
It can be quite intimidating, uh, when you're standing there and you're bee suit and the bees, get angry and they actually start to dive from you and they hit your veil and they try to get into any anywhere they can to sting you. They get really determined and so yeah, you need to make sure you're not allergic and that you you can be comfortable working around the base. And because you do need to inspect them, especially in summer, you probably need to look at them every four to six weeks.
00:15:44 Liz Beavis (guest)
And and winter, you can leave them because they're they're relatively dormant. But yeah, you definitely need to be checking them for diseases and pests. And you need to check how much money they have and whether they need another box and more space, whether they have too many bees to fit in the box that they have, whether you would split them, whether they want to swarm. So yeah, you you need to start recognizing those songs and just knowing how to manage them.
00:16:14 Liz Beavis (guest)
And then the other thing is, just read as much as you can, and if you're more of a someone that likes to listen or watch, there's there's lots of great podcasts. There's lots of information on YouTube, just need to kind of absorb as much of it as possible. If you can do a beekeeping course, there's a lot of places that run.
00:16:36 Liz Beavis (guest)
Sort of one day courses to get you some exposure. It's just yeah, learn as much as you can before you have the base on your property. I just heard a lot of people.
00:16:47 Liz Beavis (guest)
That sort of get the opportunity going by hive. Don't know anything, and then the hive dies and you just you know you've wasted all that time and money.
00:16:58 Liz Beavis (guest)
Just purely.
00:17:00 Liz Beavis (guest)
By not doing the research and understanding what you're getting. But yeah, once you understand them, they're they're pretty easy to look after and and then there's lots of ways you can extract the honey with a small setup. If you just have one or two hives.
00:17:18 Liz Beavis (guest)
You can just have us what you need for your home.
00:17:23 Liz Beavis (guest)
And yeah, I've noticed that the pollination in our garden.
00:17:29 Liz Beavis (guest)
Was just a massive improvement since we got the base and particularly we never used to get any capsicums or.
00:17:39 Liz Beavis (guest)
Peppers and we never used to get.
00:17:43 Liz Beavis (guest)
A lot of pumpkins or zucchinis.
00:17:46 Liz Beavis (guest)
Sorry, they obviously weren't really being pollinated properly until we got the Beehive, so it's it's definitely worth the effort if you're interested in growing your own food. It's not just the honey that you're going to get, it's you know it's going to increase your vegetable garden production as well.
00:18:04 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
And and that's the I think a good kit, because I think a lot of people who are listening. Not only are they interested in the beekeeping, but they want to grow their own food on their property. Let me ask you this and you might not know the answer to this, but to get started do you need? Do you need something with like 3 to 5 acres or can you do it it? You know like we have only one acre here, it's not, you know. And obviously our House is on it too. So it's not a huge.
00:18:33 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
Piece of land is there you know any size that you recommend or do you need to be out in the country to do this or can you do it in a relatively populated area? What is what? What is your recommendation there?
00:18:49 Liz Beavis (guest)
Yes, uh, that's that's probably the good thing about base is that they're they're the only sort of livestock that has no size restriction because they they fly up to 10 kilometers, which.
00:19:00 Liz Beavis (guest)
Ohh, you'll have to work out how many miles that is. I'm sorry, but they, you know, they just fly off and find the flowers and flowering trees and and whatever they need. So they're not going to be confined to your property. And the main thing is just to make sure you've got a safe place to put them where and pits, children, neighbours aren't going to get too close to the hive.
00:19:31 Liz Beavis (guest)
So I've seen them even in cities. There's there's a lot of people putting them up on rooftops, and especially if they can be close to city parks and gardens and things I can get a really good honey crop there, so you're really not limited by the space that you have. It's just that if you've got a suitable place to put them where you'll be safe. And because especially.
00:19:56 Liz Beavis (guest)
So yeah, when they first come out of the hive, it's called the cleansing flight.
00:20:02 Liz Beavis (guest)
So they do actually just poop as they fly out of the hive, so you don't want them to fly out over your neighbours washing line or or something like that. So yeah, you just got to consider that you've got a suitable place for them and but and the other thing is, you need to look at your local government regulations so I know there's some places here where you're only allowed one or two hives on a suburban kind of block. But yeah, once you get.
00:20:33 Liz Beavis (guest)
Now on to bigger properties. You can have as many hearts as you want.
00:20:38 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
Well, Liz, thank you so much for all of the great tips that you gave us today. Can you tell people where they can find you and learn a little bit more about what you're doing and how you help people?
00:20:52 Liz Beavis (guest)
Oh yes, so my website is www.8hyphenacres.com.au and I've got lots of blog posts on there as well as all of my products. I've got a few ebooks there that might help people, and I'm also on Facebook and Instagram as eight acres natural living. So look me up there.
00:21:21 Liz Beavis (guest)
And yeah, if anyone's got any questions, I'm happy.
00:21:24 Liz Beavis (guest)
Peter message me or e-mail me. I love talking about this stuff. So yeah get in touch and tell me what you're doing as well.
00:21:33 Dr. Destini Copp (host)
And we'll make sure that all of those links are in the show notes, so people can just click on them and find you. And thank you so much for all of the great tips that you shared. And I love learning a little bit more about beekeeping today.
00:21:47 Liz Beavis (guest)
Thanks been great chatting to you.