Backyard Beekeeping: Get out and "Do!"

As beginning beekeepers, I imagine you all have many questions and concerns. One thing I have come across is this: you can only read and watch so much--you need to get out and "do!"

In hopes to give you all a great head start into the bee game, we're going through the process ourselves with some of our local Great Falls, Montana customers:

I'm fascinated by what bees can accomplish. This fascination drove me to a point where I said, "I want to have bees." Now I'm to the point where I want to catch wild bees.

After a lot of research this winter, I found out that saying is really true: you can only learn so much from reading. So after exhausting my data plan searching bee videos on YouTube and browsing various beekeeping websites, I had to talk to a human about this new adventure I was planning to undertake.

Long story short running out of data is the best thing that could have happened. It forced me to seek out real, local experts whom I learned more from in a couple lunch visits than I did with 50 gigabytes of Verizon data!

It turns out that there is a vast pool of local knowledge out there for bees, but it took me a while, and more data, to find the ones I needed. Social media turned out to be my best source. I found the right combination of general information plus real people who were passionate about what they do.

To help you weed through the random resources I've compiled a few that will lead you to real people who live in your area that can help get you started. According to a few experts I've recently met, they are also great resources for savvy veterans who run into the rare problem that they haven't encountered. Of course I'm only one person scrolling around on a 3 ½" mobile device, so if you know of good local bee resources please share them with me so I can add it to our list.

Wish me luck as I try to wrangle bees this summer!

--Drew Steinberger