Rick's Bees

My father loved honey. He’d scoop it right out of the jar on a spoon. He’d spread it on bread and butter. When we were kids, we’d have  peanut butter and honey sandwiches. We’d have honeycomb in the kitchen regularly.

I didn’t get it…for years.

I finally got it. I tasted real honey, from a real Local Producer, and I realized that the taste that my father had grown up with in Holland was not the “grocery honey in a squeeze bottle”. I finally saw the light last year.

Once I found Farmers Market honey, I wanted to know more. I started reading everything I could find on beekeeping and honey production and beeswax candles, and Royal Jelly and wintering colonies.

I took a class in “Beginning Beekeeping” from the #1 honey producer in St Croix county Wisconsin, Dale Wolf. Dale is a third-generation beekeeper after his father and his grand-uncle, in Baldwin, Wisconsin. I had a pretty good feeling that I wanted to start keeping bees…but after Dale’s class, I was hooked. Stung, you might say.

This is my blog, hopefully chronicling my first year as a hobby-level beekeeper. Sure I’d love to get hundreds of pounds of sweet, golden honey to sell at Farmers Market. I’d love to be able to melt down pounds of beeswax from comb cappings and make dozens of beeswax candles to sell. (just not too sure how productive the first year is going to be…)

But, I’m just starting with two hives (the wooden boxes are the hives. A colony is a group of many thousands of bees, mostly female, that work together to get things done). These two hives are the beginning of sort of a great adventure.

Come on along, I hope I can keep you interested, and when we get through the summer, I hope we have some honey to share. This is going to be quality Scott County Minnesota honey. If I have enough, it will be for sale, though probably not over the web. Maybe next year.

Let’s get started! Follow my updates under the “News” menu.

-Rick

Oh…and I’m eating peanut butter and honey again