Beekeeping class returns!
It’s March, which means it’s almost Bee Season! All around the region, beekeepers are preparing their girls for the busy summer ahead. Spring blossoms are beginning to appear, and our warmer days are abuzz with excitement at what Spring may hold. For us, that means kicking off the year’s first Beekeeping classes for new and hopeful beekeepers in our area!
For the last three years, Bees in the Burbs has been working in tight partnership with a leading local honeybee researcher to better educate those in our local community who hope to tackle the challenging and rewarding world of beekeeping.
Each class is led by Danny Najera, a local biology professor at Green River College who has dedicated his career to studying honeybees and raising awareness of their threatened state. Thanks to his research, important work is being done to mitigate the danger posed by the “cataclysmic” varroa mite.
In these classes, students are educated not only on the biology and social order of a honeybee colony, but on how to effectively care for and protect the colony over the calendar year, including from often-overlooked and misunderstood dangers like mite infestation.
Danny is keen to point out that these should be considered “no nonsense” classes designed to shed light of the realities of beekeeping and beg the question of students; why do you really want to do this? The intention is not to push beekeeping as merely a fun hobby, nor is it to promote or sell beekeeping products, but to ensure that honeybees have adequate, educated caretakers. Students can expect to learn about both the wonderfully magic side of beekeeping, as well as the serious challenges all beekeepers face each year; from protecting against mite infestation, to exposing themselves to tens of thousands of potentially angry needles, very regularly.
This is now our third year hosting these classes with Danny, and this year we’re so excited to have also partnered with Johnson’s Home and Garden in Maple Valley to bring classes to more hopeful beekeepers than ever before! Graciously offering up their large warehouse to host our students, we filled more than 40 seats for our first class of the year, and had plenty of room for folks to interact with beehives and the tools associated with the job. Excitingly, over half of our students stayed for both the 101 and the 201 classes - a full day of dense beekeeping education from a leading honeybee educator!
Of course we thank Danny as always for his passionate defense of honeybees and for his continued research into better understanding the local risks and challenges facing them today. We also want to give a huge shout out and thank you to Jim and the entire team at Johnson’s for your support in hosting these classes, and for providing an amazing open indoor space for us to talk about bees all day!
Keeping honeybees can be incredibly rewarding if you are keeping them for the right reasons, or it can be an incredible waste of time and energy and resources if you are not prepared to accept the difficult challenges of beekeeping.
You will get stung.
All your bees will die.
Varroa mites will show up.
You’ll spend more money than you think.
But if you take these courses before you commit, you will be prepared for these (and more) realities and armed with the remedial knowledge to help you really decide whether keeping honeybees is right for you.
If you’re interested in Beekeeping 101/201 courses, but missed our kickoff classes this week, worry not! We will be back with Danny at Johnson’s on March 28, at 9:00AM, offering the same course content.
You can register for one or both March 28 classes by clicking the button below.
