In looking to start keeping honey bees I've nearly finished this YT beginners course. His tongue is a bit distracting but it's free to listen to. Spending some time on a beekeeping forum, nearly all there seem very against starting a hive but not maintaining it. They will grow then swarm possibly towards your neighbours, most suggesting you would be very irresponsible to do that. But, some have written books about pretty much doing that, not interfering with them apart from end of season honey collection.
I’m really glad to see that you are learning about how to keep bees before getting them! That’s great and really the best way for you (and your bees!) to enjoy your new endeavour. It’s hard enough to know what to do sometimes, but if you have no clue of what’s going on or what your bees are up to, it can be very frustrating and things tend to go badly.
My view is that if you take on animals, you also take on the responsibility of looking after them. If you want to keep bees, being responsible and learning about how to do that in a way that’s good for you, the bees and your neighbours seems the least that could be expected.
You should inspect your hives as needed to manage them effectively and you are required (most places) to look for disease at regular intervals. That doesn’t mean you need to interfer with the bees when there’s no need. (=Always have an aim with what you’re doing and why.) If you want to go down the route of a more hands-off or ”natural” approach, I urge you to learn how to do it the conventional way first, so that you can read your bees, the clues they give you and you know what to expect, before you try running hives with fewer inspections and handling or hives that doesn’t allow for proper inspections. You’re learning a new skill and as with any new skill, in the beginning more support and aids will be really valuable and probably even necessary, but as you become more proficient you’ll be able to pare it down to the bare essentials.
It’s interesting how many people go for some of the log-like hives that are targeting the ”I just want to give bees a home on my property because they’re struggling to find natural hollows in trees etc, but I don’t want to interfer with them in anyway because that’s ’unnatural’” crowd, yet they still all want to collect some honey from said bees. The bees store honey to survive the winter and bad-weather spells, but if you do nothing to manage your bees and you don’t want to learn anything about beekeeping, how will you know if they have an excess for you to take?
As pointed out above, getting started with beekeeping is surprisingly expensive, so my suggestion is to find your local beekeepers’ association and visit their apiary, or any experience local beekeeper that will let you help them lift and carry in exchange for learning how to handle bees. Better to find out if it’s for you and what you actually need before you invest a lot of time and money.
