Our third and final PerfectBee Course is called A Healthy Beehive. It builds on the content we delivered in Course 1 : Learn About Bees and Course 2 : Your Beehive.
Setting up your first beehive is tremendously exciting and stimulating. Aside from the curiosity associated with learning about bees, hives, equipment, clothing and more, there are few things as satisfying as installing your first bees in your first beehive. Our first two courses offered the knowledge you need to reach that point.
For a true beekeeper, though, installing a beehive is just a start. You are going to experience fascinating events as you help your bees. But installing your bees in their new home brings some new challenges, not just for you but also for your bees.
Let's cut to the chase. There's a good chance you will lose bees. It's a tough message but it's a realistic one. Even the most experienced of beekeepers face losses, most explainable but occasionally not.
We certainly don't recommend a casual acceptance of lost bees. Every loss is not just a sad situation but also a tremendous opportunity to learn.
That is the focus of Course 3 : A Healthy Beehive.
We provide you with an understanding of the primary risks that may threaten your bees. Over time, you will build enough knowledge and will be able to proactively identify issues, often taking actions to avoid problems. Sometimes you won't be that lucky and will need to learn from a negative experience, in the hope that you can avoid it happening again.
On the one hand, we want to be open, transparent and realistic in telling you that the loss of bees is, sadly, not uncommon.
But we also want to remind you that there are a tremendous number of beekeepers, many individual hobbyists, who have had great success looking after bees, all the way to the enjoyment of sweet honey.
Let's look at what we have in store. Like the other two courses in Academy, course 3 is divided into three sections.
The long-term success of the bee is a marvel of nature. They have survived for millions of years, with an amazing co-existence with flowers. This speaks to the incredible resilience and independence that bees possess.
And yet today they face more threats to their future than ever before. This has reached the point where the "Save the Bees" mantra is a loud message from many sources.
But what exactly are these threats? What can we do proactively to avoid them and, if problems do strike the colony, can we help as beekeepers?
This initial section, Threats to Bees, is largely educational in context, as a precursor to a detailed coverage of beekeeper options in the next section, Inspecting Your Beehive.
In Threats To Bees, we look at the following important topics such as:
With an understanding of the potential for setbacks, we turn to the important task of inspecting a beehive. We don't just focus on potentially negative situations that may arise. While those are covered, we will also walk through the steps and value in a regular, positive and proactive inspection.
This section will cover the following topics.
This a rich and detailed section and at the end you should be in a great position to launch your beekeeping life!
We do it all for the bees. But we all like a little reward for ourselves!
Intentionally left till the end of our course (because if this is at the front of your mind as you become a beekeeper you are thinking about it all wrong!), we cover the ways in which we can realize some rich rewards!
This section covers topics such as:
