For those who have an interest in beekeeping, but are not sure where to start, your local beekeeping club is often an excellent first step. Local beekeepers are best able to take an aspiring student and guide that student through the various stages of preparing for successfully maintaining honeybee hives. To find your closest beekeeper club, check one of these national links:
Bee Culture Magazine's Beekeepig Clubs by State
Never before has such an abundance of information been available to so many people, and that is certainly true for beekeeping. A number of outstanding websites provide a huge amount of information for both the newcomer beekeeper and those who have decades of experience.
One of the best sites I've ever found for rock-solid information, based on decades of hands-on work combined with extensive scientific training, is Randy Oliver's www.scientificbeekeeping.com. His website features beginner beekeeping info along with even-handed, expert reviews of the latest beekeeping research. His website is regularly updated and provides extensive, practical information for beekeepers regardless of experience level. Very highly recommended.
Additional sites include:
The Daily Green's Intro to Beekeeping
Beeworks.com's Getting Started Guide
Brushy Mountain Bee Farm's Getting Started Guide
BeeFolks.com's Get Started with Bee Clubs
Bees-Online Getting Started Guide
Dadant.com Beekeeping Educational Materials
These PDF files provide valuable information to beginning beekeepers:
UC-Davis Getting Started Guide
ATTRA Intro to Beekeeping
If exploring websites is not your cup of tea, you still have a wide variety of books to choose from to learn about beekeeping. We have used a variety of books over the years to guide our own efforts. While not every question will be answered in each of
these books, all of them have something to offer. Our Bee Books page lists those books and provides a short description about each.
Many agricultural organizations may not focus on honeybees directly, but they advocate for sustainable methods at least in part to protect our insect partners. They recognize to varying degrees how critical honeybees are to continued agricultural production. Some of those organizations are:
Sustainable Agriculture Education Association
World Sustainable Agriculture Association