Beekeeping for Beginners Review: What Did I Think of This Book?

Beekeeping for Beginners certainly applies to me! I’ve often thought about how much I love honey and wondered what it would be like to have a beehive and produce it myself. I’ve never followed through and gotten a hive and bees though. It seems totally intimidating. I feel like I don’t even know what questions to ask.

And then recently, I was offered a review copy of this book authored by an online friend named Amber Bradshaw.

I jumped on it! This sure seems like just what I need. Now I’ll have enough knowledge to get started looking for what I need. And I might even know what questions to ask when I get stuck!

I’m sure experience is the best teacher, but this book will alleviate some of the basic mistakes that a beginner beekeeper might run into.

Bekeeping for Beginners Review

Beekeeping for Beginners Review: How to Raise Your First Bee Colonies by Amber Bradshaw

Beekeeping for Beginners is exactly that–geared towards the beginner. It doesn’t use complicated terminology that beginners can’t understand. It’s also nicely put together, including beautiful pictures.

As a side note, I was interested in keeping bees for honey at first, but in this book Amber talks about why she wanted to keep bees, and it wasn’t honey. It was for pollination purposes! She had been having issues with her garden for the lack of pollinators so a beehive was a natural thing to do next.

That’s another positive that I hadn’t even thought about before I saw this book.

There are 10 sections in Beekeeping for Beginners

  1. “So, Do You Want to Keep Bees?” – This chapter goes over the pros and cons of keeping bees and making your final decision, once you’re fully informed.
  2. “Honeybee 101” – This chapter goes over the types of bees: queen bees, worker bees, and the like. Did you know there are different types of worker bees too? I didn’t know that before I saw this book.
  3. “A Home for Your Bees: Choosing a Hive” – This chapter goes over beehives.
  4. “Planning Your Colony”
  5. “Bringing Home the Bees”
  6. “The Bee Inspector”
  7. “The Beekeeping Year” – This chapter takes you on a journey through a whole season, what happens at different times of the year, and what you have to be aware of during the process.
  8. “All About Honey”- This chapter describes how to extract honey and what to do with the honeycomb.
  9. “Keeping Your Bees Healthy & Your Colony Productive” – Did you know bees can get diseases? They’re covered here!
  10. “The Future of Your Bees”
Interior page with an image of honeybees clustered around their queen bee.
Smoker, uncapping tool, bee brush, and hive tool.
Interior page comparing the langstroth, top bar, and warre hives.
Interior page identifying the queen bee with size, shape, and stinger.

This book is worded without the bee terminology that I have no clue what it means. Amber is thorough about explaining what the terms mean in regular english that a beginner like me would not understand.

The inside of this book shows images of the different types of bees. It also contains information and pictures of the different types of hives and common beekeeping tools (e.g., smoker, uncapping tool, bee brush, and hive tool).

In short, as my Beekeeping for Beginners review concludes, this is a great book geared toward beginners. User-friendly, it even includes a glossary with definitions.

This book is now available at Amazon.

Go check out Beekeeping for Beginners here!

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