Homegrown Honey Bees: An Absolute Beginner's Guide to Beekeping Your First Year, from Hiving to Honey Harvest

Beekeeping 1-2-3

Essential information to see you through the first year -- from inspecting the hive to avoiding stings

Keeping bees is fun and fascinating and stocks your pantry with liquid gold. Who could ask more of a hobby? With practical instruction and personal observations, Alethea Morrison guides you in choosing equipment and managing healthy colonies through every season. Profiles of urban beekeepers offer advice on keeping hives in cities, and Mars Vilaubi's up-close photography reveals the inner workings of a busy hive, the anatomy of a honey bee, and much more.

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Alethea Morrison is the author of Homegrown Honey Bees. She lived in San Francisco with her husband, photographer Mars Vilaubi, before stepping into the wild yonder of rural Massachusetts together to raise their son, keep bees and chickens, brew beer, sew clothes, grow heirloom beans, and otherwise slow down to smell the flowers of a handmade life. Their experience raising chickens was chronicled in Chick Days. Morrison works as the Creative Director at Storey Publishing and serves as president of the Northern Berkshire Beekeepers Association.Photographer Mars Vilaubi chronicled the adventures of his three backyard hens from their first days out of the egg through their first days laying eggs in Chick Days. He lives in western Massachusetts.