beekeeper
Americannoun
noun
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of beekeeper
Explanation
A beekeeper is someone who manages bee hives and extracts honey. If you see a person wearing a white jumpsuit and a hat with a veil — and they're covered in buzzing insects — it's probably a beekeeper. If you want to get really fancy, you can call a beekeeper an apiarist. Beekeepers manage apiaries, or networks of honey bee hives. They care for the hives, making sure they are an ideal environment for the bees to live and make honey. It's also the beekeeper's job to carefully extract honeycomb without harming the bees. Many people keep bees as a hobby, yielding just a little bit of honey each year.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Funkhouser, a veteran commercial beekeeper, should have around 1,200 hives under his care.
From Barron's ● May 19, 2026
These are cared for by a local beekeeper, with their honey available at the on-site honesty shop.
From BBC ● Feb. 20, 2026
There are even bees and a beekeeper, who harvests honey for employees to take home.
From Barron's ● Nov. 15, 2025
Teddy, a hobbyist beekeeper, opens the film alarmed that now the bees have disappeared, too.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 23, 2025
Along the walls were topsy-turvy shelves of cookbooks and books about the history of baking and how to be a beekeeper.
From "The Way to Rio Luna" by Zoraida Cordova
Lamas and his colleagues then formulate advice to share with beekeepers around the nation.
From Barron's ● May 19, 2026
In a lot behind a disused West Virginia gas station at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains, Roy Funkhouser is surrounded by about a dozen beekeepers and countless buzzing bees.
From Barron's ● May 19, 2026
With honey, Majtán says, "the best way is just to buy from local beekeepers".
From BBC ● Feb. 9, 2026
"Previous studies showed that failing queens were heavily infected with viruses, and now we know that those infections can lead to supersedure, which is risky for the colony and expensive for beekeepers to manage."
From Science Daily ● Nov. 22, 2025
Although colony losses occurred steadily through 2020, there were several years in which beekeepers reported sustainable colonies and it looked as though bees might have escaped danger.
From "The First State of Being" by Erin Entrada Kelly
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
