Beyond Beginner Beekeeping

• #1- The Rut and why it’s time to move forward.

• #2- Recommendations & how to Level up your Beekeeping Game!

Now let’s get into the core of each point! The world of beekeeping is waiting for you!

Point #1- The Rut and why it’s time to move forward in beekeeping.

Coming up with the topic for this post (and the correlating YouTube video here) was a result of asking myself a couple of important questions:

• Why is my book, The Intuitive Beekeeper: Beyond Master Beekeeping not on the top search results on Google or Amazon?

• …and two, What are my teaching goals for beekeeping? Why do I have a YouTube channel and who is it really for?

The answers to these two questions came immediately after realizing one simple thing which I am about to share with you.

So the answer to both of my questions came to me when I realized that the books AND videos that came up the most in a Google search and YouTube search for beekeeping had ONE THING in common: The word “beginner” was in the title of everything!

The Rut:

That got me to thinking and then coming to the conclusion that beekeeping is stuck in the beginner level. Constant struggle. Constant guessing. Constantly never moving forward. We basically have two levels right now: Beginner and Advanced commercial beekeepers with a HUGE gap in between.

This helped me to understand where I am coming from in my own teaching style. It has always been my goal to improve, grow, expand and continue the path of knowledge and beekeeping experience.

My purpose for writing my books and running my YouTube channel have been to help beginners move past beginner beekeeping.

My book doesn’t come up on top searches because the word “beginner” isn’t in the title! However, it is in fact designed for all levels of beekeeper.

We need to move Forward:

It’s time to move out and move forward in our beekeeping operations no matter the level: hobbyist or small-scale, for TWO very important reasons:

• Mastery & Expertise: It’s time to close the gap and become our own teachers, referring to other more experienced beekeepers only for the purpose of growing rather than to see “if we’re doing it right.”

• Adaptability & Growth: As we begin to push past the beginner level, we become more adaptable, able to help those behind us also push forward and begin to grow into the unknowns of beekeeping with a sense of wonder and expectation of something new and exciting!

Point #2- Recommendations on how to level up your beekeeping.

Okay, so how do we actually do this? How can we move forward and get unstuck from this murky rut of stuckness? I’m glad you asked 😉

Two simple ways to begin leveling up in beekeeping:

• Start looking for books that DO NOT have the word “beginner” in the title. Beginner books have their place but after a while they simply regurgitate the same old stuff like a mamma bird does worms to its baby birds. Here are some examples:

1- At the Hive Entrance by Storch.

2- The Beekeeper’s Lament by Nordhaus

3- Wisdom of the Bees by Berrevoets

4- Song of Increase by Freeman

5- The Spiritual Foundations of Beekeeping by Lorenzen

These books are ones that I have chosen and hand-picked for one very simple reason: to get you to begin thinking about beekeeping differently; to begin seeing beekeeping from an entirely different perspective.

• The second thing is to begin watching videos that are not tailored for beginners (unless you truly are beginning). Of course, my channel is designed for this but there are others as well. I recommend watching The Canadian Beekeeper’s Blog (YouTube). This guy is a thinker; quickly testing whether something will work or not. He runs LOTS of hives and as a result of operating at a big level, he has to THINK at a big level too! Perhaps something he does, or others like him, could be applied to your smaller operation.

Thanks for reading all the way to the bottom 😉. I want to hear from you!