The Road to Keeping Bees

In January 2012, Mama Lion suggested we look into keeping honey bees as pollinators for our garden. We're always looking for ways to get the most from our little garden - adding raised beds, adding a compost bin, building a small greenhouse, and getting some chickens over the previous couple of years. Keeping bees sounded challenging and fun, so we started looking into what it would take to add bees to our minifarm.

The first step we took was looking at beehives on the internet - learning about the different styles and the amount of space that is needed to have a hive or two. We live on about 1/8 of an acre, in a duplex, so space is a big issue in anything we do. I had already moved a section of fence to create room for our garden and greenhouse, and the chicken coop/run takes up a 4ft by 8ft chunk of the back yard, so we were pretty short on space. With this in mind, and for a few other reasons that I'll discuss later, we started thinking about Warre style hives.

In our internet reading, we found out that there's a very active beekeepers association in our area, meeting once a month and running an annual "Bee School". We went to the January meeting to see if it was something that would be beneficial, and decided that we would attend Bee School, waiting until the next year to get our first bees. We were still preparing the garden area and getting the chickens up to speed, so our plate was pretty full. Waiting turned out to be one of the best decisions we made in the process, as it gave us ample opportunity to prepare, observe, and learn.

This blog is my attempt to share our experiences as new beekeepers, and help others take the leap by sharing our story.

One of our bees on a sage bush