Beekeeping: Honey, wax and pollination · Alt Ordo Systems Guide
A honey bee colony is 20,000 to 75,000 bees, one queen and a few hundred drones living in a stack of wooden boxes you can take apart frame by frame. In a good year a strong colony stores more honey than it needs and you take the surplus, plus a little wax. Its foragers also pollinate your garden, orchard and berries for two miles around. In return you check it every week or two in spring and summer, count its mites, leave it enough honey for winter, and accept that colonies die: US beekeepers lost about 40% of their colonies between April 2025 and April 2026, and backyard keepers lost more than commercial ones.
This guide helps you choose a site, set up two Langstroth hives, start them from packages or nucs, keep the mites in check, get them through winter, and take honey and wax in year two without taking what the bees need.
What's inside. 18 pages in 9 chapters (At a glance, Where it works, How it works, Size it, Parts and cost, Set it up, Run it, Rules and permits, How it connects), then the sources and a notes page. 6 numbered figures drawn for this guide. You also get a worked example with a fill-in worksheet, 10 numbered steps, a year-round calendar, and a troubleshooting table.
Three builds, costed line by line (typical US prices, October 2026):
- Bare-bones: ≈$1,200–$1,320
- Standard: ≈$1,610–$1,780
- Comfortable: ≈$2,500–$2,810
Sourced and fact-checked. Facts and figures are cited to the 36 sources listed at the back, and the whole guide was fact-checked before release. General guidance, not engineering advice: your county and a qualified pro have the last word on your site.
Pairs with other Alt Ordo Systems Guides: The off-grid vegetable garden; Canning and food preservation; Hoop greenhouses; Finding off-grid land. For your county's permits and rules, see our county and state guides.
Instant PDF download. After checkout you get a download link by email. Letter-size pages, made to read on screen or print at home.