Beekeeping like most occupations can be just a hobby with one or two beehives or you could have 1, 2 or 3 thousand bee hives! I started beekeeping with one hive in my back yard. It was a swarm collected by a friend who I meet at the Collingwood children farm. I started off by reading as much as I could about the subject from books that I borrowed from the library, you should find most public libraries have a reasonable number of books on beekeeping. Most of those books will be written for Europe or the USA and thus the seasons are backwards.
One of the thing I had no idea about was being stung by a bee, and I can assure you that was a very fast learning curve. Everyone will react to a bee sting and the intensity of that reaction will very from person to person. My reaction was to swell up from joint to joint and this initially lasted about a week. It was very uncomfortable and at times painful as the swelling reduced. The good news was that after a number of stings the intensity decreased rapidly and now I hardly react at all. Initially when stung it is always painful unfortunately that doesn’t go away as easily as the reaction. You do get use to it and it becomes more of just an annoyance.
So d’you still want to be a beekeeper?
