Archive Special: How To Get Started With Bees - Part 1 (371)

371 - Archive Special: How To Get Started With Bees - Part 1 

Jeff Ott: Hey, everybody. We want to welcome you to this archive special of a past Beekeeping Todayepisode.

Dr. Becky Masterman: It is the time of year when those new beekeepers start consuming information.

Jeff: That's why we've chosen this How to Get Started in Beekeeping Part 1 from a couple of years ago as our archive special.

Becky: Everybody else who starts listening to it, you're on your own for Part 2, 3, and 4. Hopefully, after you listen to this one, you'll continue on to the rest of the series.

Jeff: Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast presented by Betterbee, your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment. I'm Jeff Ott.

Becky: I'm Becky Masterman.

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Jeff: Hey, a quick shout-out to Betterbee and all of our sponsors whose support allows us to bring you this podcast each week without resorting to a fee-based subscription. We don't want that, and we know you don't either. Be sure to check out all of our content on the website. There, you can read up on all of our guests, read our blog on the various aspects and observations about beekeeping, search for, download, and listen to over 300 past episodes, read episode transcripts, leave comments and feedback on each episode, and check on podcast specials from our sponsors. You can find it all at www.beekeepingtoday.com.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to this special show, How to Get Started with Bees in 2024. This is Part 1. It's a companion piece to our earlier series that we did a couple of years ago, How to Get Started with Bees. Sitting here around the Beekeeping Today Podcast table is Jim Tew, Becky Masterman, part of the Beekeeping TodayPodcast family, Jim from Honey Bee Obscura. Hey, thanks for joining me here.

Becky: Happy to be here, Jeff.

Dr. Jim Tew: Thank you for including me. I'm looking forward to it.

Jeff: Four years ago, we did the How to Get Started with Bees, and it continues to be our number one downloaded episode of all time.

Jim: That's both honoring and frightening at the same time, but I'm glad to hear that it's holding up.

Becky: I listened to it, and I was impressed. I hope that everybody listening to this episode takes a listen too.

Jeff: Those thousands and thousands of downloads, how many thousands of those are attributed to you, Becky?

[laughter]

Becky: To be very honest, it's one and a half. The first time I could-- No, I'm kidding.

Jeff: Yes, I fell asleep in the second time.

Becky: It was actually so much fun to listen to you discuss getting started in bees. I listened to all four episodes. I took notes. I wanted to make sure that I was ready for this. You guys, you set a great precedent. I studied, even though I love talking to people about how to get started in beekeeping. This won't be my first conversation about it. I feel like I'm prepared now.

Jim: I've got an odd comment for those who are considering turning us off because they started in beekeeping years ago. It's been my experience you start in beekeeping every year. You may not start from ground zero, but every year is a new beginning. Every year holds great promise. Who knows how that plays out? I start over and over and over again every year.

Jeff: I absolutely do start over every year.

Becky: Every year is different.

Jeff: One of these years, I'm going to get it right.

Jim: I'm not going to comment on that, Jeff. I'm going to leave that hanging in the air there.

[laughter]

Becky: We're not going to save you on that one.

Jim: [unintelligible 00:03:58] to you when.

Jeff: The point being is that beekeeping today is challenging. When we all started, it was pre-Varroa.

Jim: [laughs] Right.

Becky: It was also pre-COVID.

Jeff: Well, it was pre-COVID, too. Pre-Varroa. The big thing then, when I started, Jim, when you started, was American foulbrood. That was the terrible ghost in the closet. Today, there are so many other obstacles for a beekeeper, and you are managing Varroa. As our friend of the podcast, John Miller, says, "You're managing two bugs in a hive." You're managing the honey bee, and you're managing the Varroa. If you talk to our other guests we've had on the show, you're looking at the small hive beetle, you're looking at Tropilaelaps, you're looking at all sorts of pests and pestilence.

It's a lot harder. I think that anyone starting with bees today needs to understand that it's not always easy to get started with bees successfully the first year, or even the second year. Expect to have losses.

Becky: Well, that's a real high note there. [laughter] Can we take a step back?

Jeff: Yes.

Becky: Maybe we start by talking about good reasons to start beekeeping, instead of--

Jim: He's right, and he's wrong. Beekeeping is harder to do than it used to be, but it's no less fulfilling. It's no less rewarding.

Becky: It might be more expensive?

Jim: It's more expensive, but since I'm the eternal optimist, there's so many more quality pieces of equipment and devices to own. The catalog is just a go-to source now compared to the catalogs in 1965 and '73, when all those years ago, you could put them in your shirt pocket. Now that catalog is almost a collectible thing. There's so much to choose from, and the quality is so high.

Jeff: They also include so much more information, too. Our sponsor, Betterbee, a large portion of their catalog is educational and providing first-year beekeepers some great hints, tips, and resources for information that they can help them get started. Thank you for that correction, because I didn't mean to go down that negative spiral. The point was, don't be upset by having to start every year. There are many good reasons to get started in beekeeping.

Becky: Why did the two of you start keeping bees? I know why I did.

Jim: I'm still working on that. I wanted to be an entomologist, but I had no idea I was going to get in beekeeping. I was working on becoming an entomologist, and in my early life, the only job you could get in entomology was pesticide product review. I thought that was my future. I literally accidentally took a bee class due to scheduling problems, and it changed everything. I turned a corner accidentally. I'm still looking for legitimate work, Becky, right now, but the beekeeping thing seems to be here to stay since I've run most of my life doing this. I started as an entomologist who took a turn within that subject field. Jeff, you talk for a while. I'm embarrassing myself.

Jeff: It's always just been a fascination for me from early on. As a young kid, got my first observation hive. My dad and I built it. An old root observation hive, and a single deep frame, and a single little shallow frame with the basswood squares up top. I had it sitting in my bedroom with the tube going out the window. It was a fun project, and that was, I think, fifth or sixth grade. I think I was sixth grade, maybe. Ever since then, and yes, that's it. It's not a career, it's a hobby. I thoroughly enjoy it.

Becky: My answer is pretty much the same as Jim. I was an entomologist taking a class. One of my classes led me to that beehive, and game over. I think it's interesting because it's captivating and is life-changing, which I think a lot of people who are listening who want to keep bees have an idea that it's life-changing because it's on their bucket list. Beekeeping literally might be something that they see as a challenge and something that they've always found fascinating and that they want to attempt and try to achieve. I think that's a fun reason to start beekeeping.

Jim: It is supposed to be enjoyable. Some aspects of it wander from that point, but overall, it's supposed to be enjoyable. In that first episode, Kim and I talked about what kind of people keep bees, but you know, anyone. I will be working next spring with a high school science teacher who wants to begin to keep bees because she wants to use them as a prop in her science classes. She's got a farm, and she's got other farm animals. It's not that she's devoted to beekeeping, it's that she's devoted to science. This floats her boat. Anyone, anywhere, can have their own personal reasons for why they stumbled into it.

Frequently, it's some guy like me who had an uncle, an eccentric uncle who kept bees. He was always the family weird guy. At the time, it didn't mean anything to me, but all those years later, you think, "My uncle kept bees." It's just all over the page as to who gets started in bees and why, and it's all over the page as to who stays in bees. The three of us seem to be committed to it for the long haul. Other people will do it till they don't enjoy it anymore, and then they take up something else, but they always feel good about it. At least they don't attack us for staying in.

Becky: You mean the bees or the people?

[laughter]

Jeff: Have you ever known someone to get into bees from ground zero with the purpose of making it a business, or is it always a hobbyist that turns sideliner turn commercial or a family-inherited business?

Jim: That's an interesting question, and no. No one comes to mind who looked at beekeeping and saw a financial empire there. There was some other reason. They started, and my first thought was, I was a lifelong woodworker, and I thought, "Well, I can build this stuff." I built equipment like crazy for two years. You go crazy making the same repetitive, mind-numbing cuts. I got that out of my system. That was briefly a reason. "I can build all this." It's all over the page. Everybody has a story about why they do this.

Jeff: Why shouldn't someone keep bees? There's someone sitting here at home listening to this, driving down the road maybe, and they're thinking, "Well, I thinking about getting bees, or I'm not sure if I should get bees." Why shouldn't someone get bees?

Becky: For me, that's an easy question to answer. If somebody wants to keep bees because they want to save them, the honey bees, that's not the place to start. It's a managed livestock animal, and it really does. You didn't even hint at it. That it requires an awful lot of care, and it involves the loss of the animal. Saving the bees isn't the answer. If you want to save bees, then you put flowers in the ground, and you do what you can do to enhance honey bee habitat and native bee habitat.

Jim: Since we're on this topic of who should not keep bees, someone who comes to mind, I've known a few instances where people have honest, documented medical emergencies. If you've got that kind of person in your family, or you are that kind of person, and you've tried to be desensitized, and you've approached the medical community asking for assistance, and it wasn't there the way you needed it, I'm not sure that you should push your luck and take on beekeeping. It's a slippery slope, but I'm happy to tell you that most people don't have true bee sting reactions. They just sometimes think they do because it hurts, and it swells, and their language goes bad.

Those are not really documented medical emergencies, the kind of thing that I've only seen about four times in my life and other people, and they are remarkably frightening experiences when you see someone react to stings that way.

Jeff: We can sum it up, why not to keep bees, is not to go out and try to save bees because the bees don't need saving. If you have a medical condition. I will just add in there a third thing is that making a living keeping bees. This is from a perspective of making money with bees. It takes a lot of hard work to make money with bees. You're going to be working sunup, sundown during the season.

Becky: Don't do it without a business plan. Don't do it without a mentor. I've known people who've actually gotten started keeping bees and quickly built it to a business. There's support out there, too, where you can get some grants, and you can get some funding to get started in a business, at least through our Department of Ag, but it has to be taken very seriously. I'm just going to say it. I brought it up before, but you need a spreadsheet to see how expensive it gets and how quickly it gets because once you start putting in all of the equipment that you need and the cost of queens, the cost of packages, nucleus colonies, however you're going to build your beekeeping empire, the numbers do not work out for quite a while and you need a lot of scale.

Jeff: Add to your spreadsheet the cost of your labor because you have to come home and buy the groceries, the heat in the house, and the water bill, and drive to and from. You got to add all of that in there, and you have to keep a lot of bees. That's why so many commercial beekeepers and sideliners, too, have turned to pollination as well, because the pollination rates are much higher than you can get for a pound of honey. On that uplifting note, let's take this quick break, and we'll be right back.

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Jeff: Let's say that someone's decided they do want to continue keeping bees even after this uplifting start to the episode here. [laughter] If the listeners are still there, it's clear that they want to keep bees. Let's look at where do you keep bees? Where's the best place to keep bees if the beekeeper lives in a city, if they're in a suburban area, or a rural area? I'll just throw that out and stand back here.

Jim: It's a complicated question with a simple answer. Where can you keep bees? You can keep them in the city, you can keep them on the farm, you can keep them in a suburban area, but the devil is in the details because the bees are going to forage over what, Becky, about 18,000 acres or so would be their foraging range. Whatever's on your plot or whatever's in your apartment complex is irrelevant. Depending on neighbors, depending on you, depending on city and county ordinances, it's just something you negotiate. Almost everybody can find somewhere to keep bees. You may have to find a friend who has a farm or a cabin.

Becky: You can keep them on a rooftop, but you always have to get the honey off the rooftop. Like you said, the devil's in the details there.

Jeff: We've had on the podcast many episodes with urban beekeeping as the topic. It's really interesting talking about taking those honey supers and supers of bees in the elevators and up and down and flights. From an urban beekeeping and rooftops, you had to consider wind. Even now, in the discussion of urban beekeeping, is the ability of the area to sustain the honey bee in that general foraging area, and how many colonies of bees can that area support. I don't think, really, from a beekeeper standpoint, if I'm sitting in an apartment building in my local city, that I'm going to do a survey and find out about bees. I think the important thing is to keep the bees in a protected, safe location.

Jim: My inclination is to wander down a path. I get off the subject easily. A bit ago, you mentioned your very first beehive was an observation hive that you and your father built. Many times, where can you keep bees? Put them in your bedroom. That's what you did. You actually lived with these animals under bizarre conditions. There's going to be swarming issues, and they're going to be hard to keep alive as compared to an established colony, but there's different ways to keep bees. If you've really got a restricted area, it may be something as novel as a large observation hive that you can enjoy looking at, pondering. That gets us down the path of observation hives, and that's not what we're trying to do today. Just that quick hit, and let's get back on the main line.

Becky: I love the idea of an observation hive, but if you do manage them, usually they have a hive that's outside that you use to rotate resources in and out. I just want to make sure that whoever's listening knows that Jeff was special if he actually made that happen in his bedroom without other bees to work with, or they were swarming all the time, which is fun, too.

Jeff: They swarmed. They did swarm.

Becky: They swarmed? I will say that the question of, do your bees have enough to eat, that's something that the beekeepers need to listen to their bees. I always tell a first-year beekeeper that you will either potentially know the answer right away if your bees just absolutely thrive the first year, or maybe they have to spend a year building their hive or their colony, and then the next year, hopefully, the resources will tell you if they have enough.

It's something that beekeepers really do need to listen to because healthy bees are going to make surplus honey, and if year after year after year you're not getting surplus honey, then there might be something wrong with the habitat in your apiary location, which is two to five miles surrounding where you are.

Jim: I do agree. You're just about to frighten me, though, because I was thinking sometimes something could be wrong with the beekeeper. If the colony just does not thrive, I'd need to know where the beekeeper's getting information, who's mentoring, how their educational growth is advancing. On one hand, beekeeping is not difficult. On the other hand, beekeeping is very difficult. It depends on where you're getting into the game, but I do agree with you completely.

Jeff: Excellent points, Jim. For any beekeeper, any person wanting to become a beekeeper and start their first year of beekeeping, you need to look at whether you're an urban beekeeper, a suburban beekeeper, or a rural beekeeper, the different paths to becoming a beekeeper, how can, one, maximize their probability of becoming a good beekeeper the first season and into the second season? The first thing that comes to my mind when you think about this is it really behooves everyone to find someone else in their neighborhood, in their area, that keeps bees and ask them to be a mentor for you, especially if they've been keeping bees for multiple years. That will be an invaluable resource for you.

Becky: I think that in what you're saying, but to keep it really simple, beekeeping is so local. It's something that it's very different in Minnesota than it is in Ohio than it is in Washington. Where you keep your bees, if you're getting local information, that's going to give you your best start and your best chances of getting established and knowing, if your colony isn't healthy, why it isn't healthy, because you need to learn from people around you.

Jim: Time is valuable here, and I don't want to get off the subject again, but I have a grandson, the first in my family, who has announced he wants to get into beekeeping next spring, and he's four hours from me. He saw me being his information source. I had to insist, you've got to find a local club, a local group, a local person. I'm going to be 50% useless at best if you call me and ask some question about a queen problem or something that you're looking at inside your colony. You've got to have somebody at your elbow until you know what you're doing.

Jeff: I cannot agree any more than that. Having someone you can call up and say, "Hey, can you come over, take a look at my bees with me," is so much better than posting a picture to Facebook or sending a picture in email or even a video. All of those are useful tools, but having someone there with you as you open the hive, even before you open the hive, stand there and watch the behavior of the hive before you open it, the comings and goings and the sounds, and even the smells of the colony before you even open it, is something you cannot translate and you cannot describe necessarily to a beekeeper, whether you're reading a book or you're reading an email or reading a post on Facebook or watching a YouTube video.

Jim: Do all of that. You watch, and read, and talk to others. All mentors are not necessarily good at it. That could be a clumsy situation for you if you get someone that you don't bond with. Once you find a good mentor who's got a philosophy and a decorum that you're comfortable with, that's a lifelong relationship. There's people, I can list them right now, not all of them, but a lot of them, who pull these mentors and lifelong esteem and refer to them lovingly long after they've crossed from this dimension. That beekeeper-mentor relationship, once really founded nicely, can really persevere.

Becky: That mentor can help you save a lot of money if you decide to invest in beekeeping as a hobby or a side hustle.

Jim: A beekeeping side hustle that has potential. Kind of like a scam phone call.

[laughter]

Jeff: What about taking classes and local clubs?

Becky: They're all over the place, universities and beekeeping clubs and community education. I see classes all over the place. You can never take too many classes, I think.

Jim: One of the side shoots of taking classes is that you just get to be with other people of your ilk. Most of the time, "You do what? You keep bees? Oh, if I keep bees, I get stung, and I swell, and it hurts. You must be crazy." You live your lonely life in this, except when you come together. All of a sudden, here's other people who have your passion. There's a reassurance that others are out there. Not only do you learn, but I think that you're reassured in this pathway that you've taken, that it's not as odd to everyone as it is to some.

Becky: I'll also say that I've been a part of many of the University of Minnesota's year-one beginning beekeeping class. Everybody figured out to ask the students, "How many of you have actually kept bees before?" So many people actually raise their hands, and then they tell you their tales of how they lost their bees. They'll tell you also that had they had a chance to do it over again, they would have taken the class before they got the bees.

It's something that, at beginning of the class, you're going to have people who have already tried and not been successful with keeping bees. Hopefully, people will find their way to a class and figure out how to, hopefully, increase their odds of that winter survival, which is what we all want every year when it gets cold.

Jim: Like everything else in our lives, those classes have improved so dramatically. I mean, since I'm 150 years old, when I started, everything was a Kodak slide projector and maybe a busted-up hive down front and an old guy giving the discussion about this. Now you can roll the streaming video, and there's just so much to subsidize those classes. They're so greatly improved, and I think so much more effective than they were in the old days when you just sat with your hive and honey bee and read for hours on end, trying to envision what this author must have meant.

Jeff: That's the really hard thing, and where the mentor comes in real good play. They take that book knowledge, that written knowledge, or even audio knowledge from a podcast, but they're able to translate that into action, to touch and feel, and combining that knowledge with the visual and sound and smell and taking it all in so that when you read it, it's a fact. When you put it into play in a hive, it becomes an art. Beekeeping really, really is an art that has underpinnings and some science fact that may or may not be. It might be true today, and it may not be true tomorrow.

That's really important, I think, to have a beekeeping buddy or a mentor or have that go-to person once a month in a regional class or a local club or even your regional meetings or even your annual beekeeping conferences. All of this builds to improve you as a beekeeper as you're looking in your colony, in your backyard, or on your rooftop. It really is so important to have that understanding to be a successful beekeeper. Otherwise, I'm afraid that many beekeepers become frustrated because they cannot get to that point where they can see the little bit of progress each season to season.

Jim: That beekeeping buddy thing, you've touched a nerve. By hook nor crook, beekeeping is a two-person operation. You've got to have either lifters or ramps or something. If you're moving bees, I don't know any human who can pick up a two-colony deep, each of those deeps full, without some kind of assistance. What comes to mind is a friend, which may be why I have so few right now, [laughter] because everybody avoids me at my age. "Can you come?" "No, I can't. I've got to have a kidney transplant that day. I know what you're going to ask. It's something about those bees, and I can't help."

Having a good friend is good in life, and it's good in beekeeping. Someone that can give you a quick opinion. Maybe not an actual mentor, but just an actual friend who's in the same bee boat that you're in, and you're just trying to bungle through it. I like the idea of having a friend, someone whose shoulder you can cry on, and yours when they need crying.

Becky: If you can get them to invest 50% of the initial investment, as long as you split the honey, that's a great idea, too.

Jim: Then all of a sudden, things take a turn, Becky, because they invest their money, and they don't like your protocol. [laughter] What was a friendship has now become a guy stalking your house.

Becky: Wait, has this happened before? [laughter] I think that's really good advice, to find somebody both to mentor you and also to help you through it. So much of beekeeping is also learning what normal is. I've gone to people's houses to help them out, and they were so proud of their colony that had three frames of bees. Yet at that time of year, it should have been two boxes full of bees, 19, 20 frames of bees. I think that having that experience and then having that person to work through what the colony development should be and help you through that is just really critical.

Jim: I have said time and again, I support this concept. Jeff has said several times, the smells, the sounds. While you're looking at a beehive, exactly how many dead bees are you standing on? The whole environment is the picture that you make your decision on. If I've got a friend there and I'm saying, "Why does this bee have no wings? I thought bees should have wings." Then you suddenly realize that you've got a runaway of Varroa infestation going on that's not been suppressed. All those little things, all those details, it's just good to have somebody else there. If not a mentor, a friend, someone in the same boat. Two brains are better than mine, for sure.

Have a friend and try to nurture that friend. Don't misuse them, and don't allow that friend to misuse you. I think I've harped on that enough. Maybe I'm giving away too many of my personal situations here. Beekeeping can be a lonely thing at times. If you're out there at two o'clock in the morning, it's probably hard to find a friend who wants to be out there with you.

Jeff: To move bees?

Jim: Sometimes you're there-- Yes, to moving bees-

Becky: To move bees.

Jim: -pollination, or whatever.

Jeff: That's painful.

Becky: That's year-two of beekeeping, or maybe four or five. [laughter] Let's not have them move bees in the middle of the night quite yet.

Jeff: Oh, yes. We don't want to talk about that. My hives, number three, and four, and five, I bought from somebody who had them out in their pasture. I tried to move these hives in June. Each box had two honey supers on them. I was out there at 2:00 AM pounding hive staples in the side of those hives.

Jim: Yes, the bees wouldn't notice that. They don't notice that. They're asleep.

Jeff: They were so happy to be moved.

Jim: That could also be a segue for getting off the subject. A bee yard does not look the same at two o'clock in the morning than it looks at two o'clock in the afternoon. You would not believe how fast you can lose a smoker or a hive tool just by laying it down and then walking away from it in tall weeds. You always find it the next day after you've run it over with the truck as you left. The bees are there 24-7. I just see them during the lighted hours, but bees are out there at night. When they're all back home, it must be like a library bringing all these books back at one time.

There's not nearly enough shelving for all those books, because in the summer months, those bees are all amassed out front with that low, threatening hum. Your job is to relocate those bee colonies someplace else. I mean, you better be suited up because they're going to be crawling and looking for parts of you that they can talk to you about. My point is the bees are there all the time, day and night. I'm just there primarily during the day. That whole apiary takes on a different personality at two and three o'clock in the morning.

Becky: That's a good point. Do you know when that apiary takes on another personality? During the rainy season. You want to make sure you can get in and out when you need to to check your bees in whatever vehicle you have, or be ready to make that trek. That's another thing. It's good to look for sites when it's raining and muddy, so you know exactly what you're dealing with when push comes to shove, and you need to move anything in.

Jeff: I know Jim's talked about this before, but getting in and out of sites, in a culvert out in front of the yard by the gate, getting a loaded trailer through that ditch is always--

Jim: The truck and the trailer wouldn't make the turn through the gate, so we had to unload the trailer in the road. I don't even want to go into it. I mean, there's not enough time. It was just, who would have thought that the truck pulling the trailer wouldn't make the turn into the farm gate? When you figure that out, it's when? It's three o'clock in the morning. Have I mentioned the fact that you got no friends? It's one of those situations when you go back and review exactly why it was you thought this would be a good idea. Most beekeeping is not keeping bees at all. Most beekeeping is, like Becky said, working on spreadsheets, putting equipment together, trying to figure out how to wire a honey pump.

This really has nothing to do with evaluating a queen's performance or looking for bee diseases. Most of what I do not do is open a beehive. Everything I do is preparing to open a beehive, and for that precious few minutes when I'm there.

Becky: Precious, they are. That's why we do it.

Jim: They are.

Becky: That's why we do it.

Jim: That's the dessert. That's the reason for all of this, is enjoying it that much.

[music]

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Jeff: In today's episode, and I do want to restate that this is a companion piece to our How to Get Started with Bees Part 1 that was released February 14th, 2020. We've talked about what makes a good beekeeper. Why does someone want to become a beekeeper? It's a new hobby, maybe a business idea, and why they may not want to keep bees. Not to save bees. Bees don't need saving. We've also talked about where can you keep bees. Well, you can pretty much keep bees anywhere. Even if you live in a city, it can be a rooftop, you don't need to be out on a farm. You can be on a suburban.

One thing we did not cover, you do want to check your local codes. Some cities and towns have nuisance codes that honey bees fall under. Check your local ordinances, and most importantly, to your success as a beekeeper, you really do yourself a favor to find a mentor when you're starting, and or a bee buddy that you can learn with and bounce ideas with and can look over their shoulders and they can look over yours and each other's bee yard just to have that second opinion to what you're seeing. I think this has been a good episode. What are we talking about next week?

Becky: Next week, we are going to talk about the time it takes to keep bees, and what the commitment is, and whether or not you can still have a cabin and a beehive, and if they have to be at the same location. We're going to talk about mentors again and classes and clubs. We're going to talk about how important it is to start out right and start out connected to the community.

Jim: Those are good points, all of them, especially the whole concept of the club and becoming an officer and becoming involved. More about that next time.

Becky: I hope that everybody listening is going to tune in to the original part one of the series and learn more about getting started. I think there is a great section about getting stung and how not to get stung. Everybody's going to want to tune into that.

[laughter]

Jeff: Stinging is always the fun topic of every beginning beekeeping course, and how to get used to being stung or not.

Jim: It's exhilarating.

Jeff: Well, Becky and Jim, thank you for joining us, the listeners, on how to get started with bees in 2024. It's going to be a good season. I know it. I can feel it in my bones.

Jim: I'm with you on that. This is going to be different. This year, when I start, I know what I'm doing. I'll get it right.

Becky: This year, the weather's going to be perfect. The flowers are going to bloom. The bees are going to be healthy. Absolutely.

Jim: I feel good about this year. [chuckles] Those who've been keeping bees for a while know why we're doing this tongue-in-cheek. Every year starts well. Every year finishes with differing degrees.

Becky: Literal different degrees. [laughter] Actually, you know what? We should add weather to the list of things to talk about next week because, wow, does weather make a difference when you're keeping bees and what you can and can't do.

[music]

Jim: Absolutely does.

Jeff: We'll talk again next week. I hope our listeners will return. Feel free to leave questions and comments. We'll talk to you soon.

Jim: Goodbye. Till next time. I'll be happy to come back and try this again.

Becky: Looking forward to it. Thanks, Jim. Thanks, Jeff.

Jeff: That about wraps it up for this episode of Beekeeping Today. Before we go, be sure to follow us and leave us a five-star rating on Apple Podcast or wherever you stream the show. Even better, write a quick review to help other beekeepers discover what you enjoy. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the Reviews tab on the top of any page. We want to thank Betterbee, our presenting sponsor, for their ongoing support of the podcast. We also appreciate our longtime sponsors, Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and Northern Bee Books for their support in bringing you each week's episode.

Most importantly, thank you for listening and spending your time with us. If you have any questions or feedback, just head over to our website and drop us a note. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks again, everybody.

[00:38:34] [END OF AUDIO]