Welcome, Friends of Bees!

My name is Mandy, and I'm the author of this blog about honeybees. My partner, Trish, is a backyard beekeeper and a woodworker who builds her own beehives. I'm a writer, so I'm taking the lead in the writing side of our bee-related efforts. We've started this blog to share our experiences around beekeeping with other people who are interested in beekeeping (especially if you're contemplating getting started!).

In addition to describing the bees in our own backyard, we plan to post reviews of books, movies, and other materials we've encountered as we continue to learn about bees. Plus, we want to make the beehives Trish builds available to a wider audience. Her hives are built to support a bee-centered, hands-off method of beekeeping that helps sustain local honeybee populations in a natural way. See the "Our Beehives" tab at the top of this page for more info.

In 2010, Trish attended a conference on natural methods of beekeeping at a Waldorf school in Portland, Oregon. Later that year, she bought a pattern for a beehive she could build herself. In winter and early spring of 2011, she modified the pattern to build a wooden beehive and placed it in the backyard of our north Seattle home. Then the bees arrived! As I write this, we're in our second year of beekeeping, and the weather has been mild enough this October that our bees are still active, flying in and out of the hive during the warmer parts of the day.

Thanks for reading our first post, and stay tuned for more bee-related news from Seattle!