Tonight my son and I attended the SEMBA bee keeping user group.  We had a good time and met a lot of interesting and very friendly people.

I was really impressed and energized by just how helpful and kind the folks at the meeting were to us.  In a single meeting, we got more help and more tips on how to get things going than I'd managed to pick up on the web in the past couple of weeks.

The next step is to take some bee keeping classes while the equipment comes in and to start looking at getting some Nucs to start raising some hives.

Alex and I went out to our property over the weekend to scout for a good place for our apriary.  I definitely want to be certain we know what we're doing before we start raising the bees since we don't want to do any harm (especially since there's been a real free fall in the bee population in the past couple of years).

On our new property, we found a clearing in the woods that I think will work well. I think there's enough flowering plants in the area for at least a couple of hives which should be enough to get us started.

Since honey production isn't really our main focus (we just want to take care of bees mainly at first) it's not too important if we are able to get honey at the end of the day (though it would be nice). Not to mention, taking care of the honey is where a lot of the grunt work comes in so we'll have to see what the level of patience we have for that part is.