Bee prepared

As many of you are aware, we are planning on creating the 'land of milk and honey' on our new property. It will take time, years in fact, but there is no time like the present to get started. We ordered our bees earlier this year and they are scheduled to come the end of April. Just like rambunctious children, bees need a home. For help we turned to one of our wise beekeeping neighbors pictured here. Appropriately many of the beekeepers around here call him Brother B.

He has been the president of the Utah County Beekeepers Association in the past and he also has many hives around the valley. He sat us down like Yoda sat down young and naive Luke Skywalker and taught us the mysterious ways of beekeeping. Then he provided us with much of the equipment we will need if we ever expect to have a golden harvest. We chose to have him build our hives (since we wanted it done right) but we will paint them which made them a little cheaper.

If you live in Utah and want to buy equipment or beehives from him, you can. Email him at s_briles@hotmail.com. He doesn't have a web address but he sent me a nice price list and was able to give us great advice on what we needed. I really liked that he didn't try to up-sell us. He just told us the pros and cons of the equipment he sells and let us make a decision on what we wanted.

The only thing we didn't buy from him were the main boxes (blue and yellow boxes) in the picture. We received the main boxes from a kind neighbor. Marisa and the kids are going to paint everything a nice, calming, clean white color.

We are excited but nervous to get started on our bees. Let us know if you all have any advice for a beginning beekeeping family.

~Michael