🐝 Buzzing for a new hobby for 2024? This Florida teen raises thousands of bees at home

ORLANDO, Fla. – If you’re buzzing for a new hobby or interest group for 2024, you may want to consider beekeeping. You don’t have to own any bees or manage hives, but a Central Florida group will keep you entertained with workshops and educate you on the importance of the insects.

When it comes to bee experts, there are quite a few of them throughout Central Florida. One of them is just a teen with about 10 years of beekeeping experience.

She invited News 6 into the hive as she works to spread the buzz and educate community members about the interesting, and crucial hobby

“The smoker we use before messing with a beehive covers your scent and makes the transition much smoother and less abrupt,” 17-year-old Miranda Clementel said. “A lot of people think the honey bees fall asleep because of the smoker or pass out and that’s not the case at all.”

Clementel said it was a neighbor who got her interested in beekeeping.

“I was very interested in what all these flying insects were. I was 8 years old, so I started asking some simple questions and that took me down the bunny hole. My neighbor had beehives and suited me up one day and I fell in love with it,” Clementel said.

Clementel has two beehives right in her backyard.

“My mom was like ‘no.’ She automatically was really afraid and didn’t want me to have bees. It was definitely a process to get her to say yes and I kind of had to beg her a little bit too, but finally she came around. Sometimes she’s still scared, but I just calm her down and give her honey to show how sweet the bees are,” Clementel said.

Clementel said although they may sting sometimes, they are a critical part of life. Honey bees pollinate $15 billion worth of crops in the U.S. each year including more than 130 types of fruits, nuts and vegetables, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“We rely on these tiny little insects so much for our food production. They pollinate so many of the foods we consume everyday in our life ranging from strawberries to blueberries, nuts and almonds... the list goes on. Without honey bees, coffee would be so much harder for us to get our hands on. It would be so much more expensive and rare because coffee flowers rely heavily on the honey bee pollination as well,” Clementel said.

Clementel said a healthy hive can hold about 80,000 honey bees.

“There’s thousands of bees going in and out of the hive and can give us hundreds of pounds of honey, but each bee only makes one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in their lifetime. It’s such a collective effort, they work as one organism in a sense,” Clementel said.

When it comes to the hive, there’s only one queen bee.

“Her body is a lot longer than the other bees, she has a different color and is larger because she’s carrying the eggs.”

One of her favorite parts about beekeeping... the honey, obviously.

“In the comb, the brood is raised and honey and pollen are stored in the little pockets (hexagons). The thicker parts are known as capped honey, liquid honey is uncapped, at this point it’s nectar,” Clementel said. “Once a beekeeper sees that a frame is about 75% full of capped honey, then beekeepers will pull the frame and extract it.”

Even though it seems Clementel knows just about everything when it comes to honey bees, she said there’s still so much to learn.

“There’s still so much to explore about them and I feel like there’s a lot we don’t know about bees still and they’re so important to our food production. I feel like getting to better understand them is a big motivation and in the future hopefully, being a part of the commercial industry, where I can have thousands of colonies and contribute to pollination,” Clementel said.

Clementel is a member of the Orange Blossom Beekeepers Association and enjoys teaching others about the hobby.

The group is a collective of backyard, side-liner and commercial beekeepers in Central Florida who serves as mentors and resources for aspiring beekeepers. The group meets the third Thursday of every month at 7 p.m. at the Orange County Extension Education Center located on 6021 South Conway Road in Orlando. OBBA also holds workshops each month in the morning in its apiary and hosts expert speakers. Click HERE to follow the Orange Blossom Beekeepers Association on Facebook.

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