Hmm, where to start?
I've been keeping bees for a few years now, but would say I'm a long way from being any kind of expert at keeping them. There are some old boys at the local association who've been beekeepers for four or five decades and still claim to be learning! It's too involved to try and describe how you keep bees here, so I'll keep it to why you might start and a few things it involves.
From a preppers view point honey and wax will be your two main crops, though propolis and pollen, among other things, can be collected from a hive too.
Honey needs no introduction from me as many will have a jar in a cupboard right now. Apart from the obvious spread on toast and a spoonful in a hot drink when you're under the weather it make a good substitute for sugar in cooking as well as a straight forward spirit lifting drink mead. It should also have a place in the preppers pharmaceutical store as an antiseptic for minor cuts grazes and burns. A reasonably healthy hive should give something like thirty to fifty pounds of honey, though crops in excess of a hundred weight are not that uncommon.
Wax has many uses other than making quality candles which burn longer and cleaner than paraffin wax candles. From tying fishing flies to cosmetics and much between, it's very saleable and more valuable than honey itself as it take four pounds of honey for bees to produce a pound of wax! Thornes[1], major UK beekeeping suppliers, will accept clean wax in payment for their products.
I doubt many will have heard of propolis, but it is a substance bees make from the resinous stuff found on plants. You know the sort of thing found on Horse Chestnuts as the leaves start to breakout. Bees process this to create a kind of glue they use to seal cracks and holes in the hive and also to encase the corpses of invaders like mice that the colony kills. I'm told they do this to prevent infections spreading from the decaying body, though I've not seen this myself. Propolis is being used to treat a wide variety of medical conditions in humans, is fairly easy to collect and commands a fairly high price. Not perhaps as much use to the prepper other than as a cash crop.
I suspect many people will have heard of royal jelly too, as it's used in medicines and cosmetics. So if you can collect sufficient quantities then that is a saleable commodity too. Though I'd say it was unrealistic for the hobbyist keeper.
So, you want to know if anyone can do it. Well, I'd say that most could. Apart from not having a fear of bees or a serious allergy to stings (though it's not unheard of for some keepers to be allergic), somewhere to keep a hive and an ability to handle some weighty boxes at times, a fully laden super (box bees store honey in) can weigh over forty pounds, are your initial concerns though there are ways around most things. Even if you don't normally worry about having a bee near you, it's a very different experience opening a hive to inspect it. In the height of summer a strong colony might have 60,000 to 80,000 bees in it, not the sort of thing you want to annoy!
I used to keep a couple of hives in my back garden, even when my oldest was toddling, though I removed them when he started to get his little mates visiting as I couldn't guarantee they'd stay away from the hives as my own son would. If you have sufficient space to place them in an area that's cordoned off then the back garden might work for you, provided yours neighbour don't freak when you loose the odd swarm. If you can access a garage roof and your neighbours are amenable, then this might work for you. Robin Leigh-Pemberton, governer of the Bank of England 1983-1993, famously kept a number of bee hives of the roof of the bank. So, you can use a bit of imagination, though a piece of farmland is an obvious choice. Surprisingly, urban bees are often better off that their rural counter-parts, as they usually have access to a wider variety of pollen and necter producing plants for longer periods of time.
If keeping bees does appeal to you, then contacting your local association[2] is the best place to start. While much can be learnt on-line and from books there's no real substitute for having an experienced beekeeper next to you to help you with your inspections when you start.
Equipment can be very expensive when you start, as can your first colony of bees. Second hand kit can usually be bought through a local association and auctions are commonplace as older members reduce the numbers of hives they keep or move on to the apiary in the sky. Most people use the standard National Hive and when you start this is probably what most should do. There is a growing body of keepers who use a different system with a hive known as a Top Bar Hive. This is a hive that can easily be made at home by any DIYer and works well for an organic style of beekeeping. For more info on this I recommend the Barefoot Beekeeper[3].
Well, I think that's plenty from me! I hope this gives an idea about starting to enjoy an activity that mankind has been involved with for tens of thousands of years. I'm sure there will be plenty of questions and I'll try to answer as much as I can.
[1]http://www.thorne.co.uk/
[2]http://www.britishbee.org.uk/local_asso ... out_us.php
[3]http://www.biobees.com/index.php
Beekeeping
Re: Beekeeping
Excellent. Thanks Huorn!