Beekeeping for Beginners
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
Online Materials and Resources
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
Downloadable Reports
These PDF files provide valuable information to beginning beekeepers:
UC-Davis Getting Started Guide
ATTRA Intro to Beekeeping
Beekeeping Books
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.
Other Resources
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
Our Successful Farming and Ranching Books
We released our very first self-published book. The Chicken Coop Manual in 2014. It is a full color guide to conventional and alternative poultry housing options, including 8 conventional stud construction plans, 12 alternative housing methods, and almost 20 different design features. This book is available on Amazon.com and as a PDF download. Please visit The Chicken Coop Manual page for more information.
Rabbit Colonies: Lessons Learned
We started with rabbits in 2002, and we've been experimenting with colony management ever since. Fast forward to 2017, when I decided to write another book, this time about colony management. The book is chock-full of practical information, and is available from both Amazon and as a PDF download. Please visit the Rabbit Colonies page for more information.
The Pastured Pig Handbook
We are currently working on our next self-published book: The Pastured Pig Handbook. This particular book addresses a profitable, popular and successful hog management approach which sadly is not yet well documented. Our handbook, will cover all the various issues involved with pastured hog management, including case studies of numerous current pastured pig operations. If you have any questions about this book, please Contact Us.
Weblog Archives
We published a farm blog between January 2011 and April 2012. We reluctantly ceased writing them due to time constraints, and we hope to begin writing them again someday. In the meantime, we offer a Weblog Archive so that readers can access past blog articles at any time.
If and when we return to writing blogs, we'll post that news here. Until then, happy reading!