For hundreds, even thousands of years, beekeeping has been primarily an experience of self sufficiency.
Since people have been keeping bees, they have done so in a manner which contributes to sustaining their lifestyle and figures in to their way of daily life.
Even in more recent beekeeping history, the "hobbyist" beekeeping experience has been associated with people who are self sufficiency minded and looking for ways to make money on the side by selling honey at the local farmers market.
Similarly, the modern "hobby" beekeeper uses their few hives to pollinate their own or someone else's garden. Thus giving them better produce for canning, etc.. as well as honey and wax to make candles and soap and other items with.
However in the past five, perhaps even nearly ten years, there has been a new class of beekeeper or perhaps a new sub variety of hobbyist that could be referred to as the "consumerist" beekeeper.
The "consumerist" beekeeper is typically someone who finds themself motivated to be a beekeeper, often based on dramatized information in the popular media, and doesn't really have the interest or ability to most of the work of beekeeping themself.
They seek to purchase everything to do with beekeeping in regards to equipment and supplies all the way to working the bees. They will seek out other beekeepers to "help" them inspect and otherwise work hives just as easily as they buy pre-assembled equipment so that they can simply set it up and go.
Is this a "bad" or "wrong" way to go about beekeeping? I won't say that it is either. Though personally I would say that they are missing out on the larger, core beekeeping experience.
The "consumerist" beekeeper experience tends to stay in the "newbee" phase for much longer than the typical novice beekeeper because they depend so greatly on other beekeepers to guide them or do it for them more often than not.
They don't really gain the full "appreciation" of learning how to put equipment together or how and when to work the hive to get the most out of it.
As the saying goes, "back in the day" this type of beekeeper would have been referred to as a "bee haver" rather than a beekeeper. They have bees and that provides them enough of the thrill of the experience. The excitement of getting honey and maybe wax from the hive makes it all "real enough" for them.
Someone once described it to me recently as similar to someone who likes birds, wants birds but doesn't really want to do the work of caring for birds themselves so they buy pre-built bird houses and other accessories to put out in their yards and some even go to the point of hiring a service to come out and maintain the birdhouses, add feed, etc...
It used to be that a "bee haver" was someone who had a bee hive in their yard but did nothing with the hive in terms of managing it or perhaps, at the most, collecting honey from it each year and not much more.
The new "consumerist" beekeeper essentially wants to make sure that their hives are managed and cared for. They just don't necessarily want to, or are able to, do it themselves.
This is largely a result of living in a consumerist economy where everything, even an experience, is purchased as opposed to even 25 years ago when most people might have said they were more interested in doing things for themselves and only were interested in having,at most, the experience facilitated for them instead of having others outright do it for them.
The modern marketplace is rushing to find ways to cater to this new type of consumerist beekeeper as the beekeeping stores and catalogs seeing as selling things are more in line with what they do.
There are hives in production as we speak to hang a container outside a window that will house bees inside of it so that people can look into it and watch the activity inside without needing to open the hive at all. Essentially, this is a bee birdhouse and there are more things like it hitting the market all the time.
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