Bee Keeping: Inspiration and Practical Advice For Would-be Smallholders

Half way through a so far very mild winter and after a few shortlived freezing spells the weather is finally getting down the traditional winter business of being bloody cold. Whilst people start their days scraping ice off car windscreens and heading to work the bees continue to do very little. Leaving me with nothing to write about.. so..

Another day another book review! Don't worry I'll keep it brief.

I was given a copy of Beekeeping as a gift by a jolly nice friend. It's published by Country Living for The National Trust this is one very attractive book. It has a yellow and black hardback cover with an olde worlde schoole booke feele to it. It's nicely laid out with colour and black and white hand drawn illustrations. As with Get Started In Beekeeping and Bees At the Bottom Of The Garden this is an introduction to beekeeping telling you how to kit yourself out and manage bees for a year, however this was written in 2007 making it more recent than either of the other two. It also has an RRP a couple of quid less than the others as well.

Inspirational and Practical Advice

-in one handy volume!

It's actually the shortest of the three books and starts with a still relevant quote for the cost of a starter beekeeping kit (hive, tools and safety gear) -afterall that's probably something worth knowing up front when deciding whether you want to continue reading about beekeeping or not. As with the other books the author, or possibly authors as it seems to be credited to an editor with no individual authors mentioned, it tells you how to start up in beekeeping, maintain your bees and harvest your/their honey. There's less science in this book than the others but TBH you probably don't really need to know the names of the each stage of a bee's gut straight away.

I've found myself referring back to this pleasant little volume a number of times in the past year and towards the end there's a month by month detailing of the beekeeper's year telling you what you should be doing and when. The entry for January doesn't say "pad out your blog with book reviews" which is quite a glaring ommission but it's still handy as a quick reference.