the truth bee told...

why beekeeping? ...the most common question i get asked is why beekeeping? the truth bee told - there isn't an easy answer as to why... except maybe why not. there are numerous reasons why one should keep bees, however, first and formost for me it's personal. one year for my niece's birthday i got her an ant farm. the next year we went for frogs. it was evident that this young girl was interested in insects as well as other wildlife. and after seeing a colony of leaf cutter ants at the yale peabody museum of natural history where we were simply amazed by the kinship of a colony. we talked about keeping bees for two years. both years we thought about getting started we were always too late. you need to order your hives during the winter to prepare for the arrival of your bees in the spring. easy right? not quite - you also have to order your bees in the winter and they sell out before spring. for two years we always forgot about our time table.

it was the winter of 2010 when we got our acts together an ordered two packages of bees with marked queens and two starter kit hives. i spent that spring break painting hive parts while our friend, todd kindly put together all of our frames. it was lindsey's ninth birthday that she received her first package of 9,000 italian honey bees. it was with conversation, some reading, watching videos and taking the advice from other beekeepers that we found our buzz.

we picked up our bees at new england bees the first week of May 2010. we found that part of beekeeping is making friends with other beekeepers. a good beekeeping friend from church helped us stake out the best location for the hives to ensure the most production. and our previously mentioned great beekeeping friend, todd, helped us pick up and shake our bees into the hives. what a great day that was!!! the sound of 9,000 bees buzzing around and the heat radiating from the package was hard to believe. we were actually BEEKEEPERS!!!

so again... why beekeeping?