For all the beekeepers and future beekeepers out there, this one is for you.
The benefits of bees are numerous: honey, beeswax and let’s not forget pollination. Raising honey bees increases pollination of flowering plants and honey bees are the heroes of pollination efforts for modern agriculture.
Anyone can master the skills necessary to be a good beekeeper. Your journey to successful beekeeping begins with preparation. We’ve compiled some of our favorite bee articles to help you get started with your bee colony, no matter where you live!
Beekeeping has been on the rise in recent years, and Ross Conrad’s book Natural Beekeeping has become a must read for enterprising apiculturalists who want to learn how to care for bees holistically and organically.
For all the beekeepers and future beekeepers out there, this one is for you! Your journey to successful beekeeping begins with constructing a suitable haven for honeybees, otherwise known as the bee hive.
Spring is here and I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get started on all of the projects I mapped out during the cold winter months – including trying my hand at incorporating bees into my homesteading adventure! As a new-bee (get it?!), I need help to get started so I did a little rummaging through the CGP archives and stumbled upon some great insight from Deirdre Heekin. Happy beekeeping, ya’ll!
To a beekeeper, thousands of bees concentrated in one area isn’t a nightmare–it’s an opportunity to help the bees find a new home safely when necessary. However, not all beekeepers began their career being fans of bees. It takes a lot of time and patience to gather up the nerve to walk directly into a swarm and handle relocating these buzzing insects.
In recent years beekeepers have had to face tremendous challenges, from pests such as varroa and tracheal mites and from the mysterious but even more devastating phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Yet in backyards and on rooftops all over the world, bees are being raised successfully, even without antibiotics, miticides, or other chemical inputs. More and more organically minded beekeepers are now using top-bar hives, in which the shape of the interior resembles a hollow log.
Top-Bar Beekeeping author Les Crowder gives a hands-on workshop in the field, focusing on how to manage bees naturally using the innovative top-bar hive system.
If you keep your hens in a stationary coop, you’re missing out on their soil building talents. Un-coop that poop by putting your flock in chicken tractors!
Curious about carrots? Before you get started on cultivating, check out these insights on growing & harvesting carrots from gardening expert Will Bonsall.
Squash newbies, this one’s for you! Learn how to harvest, cure, and store squash with these tried-and-true techniques from gardening expert Carol Deppe.
