cultivating a sustainable life
I’ve dreamed of keeping bees since I was in my early twenties, pouring over Harrowsmith Country Life and Mother Earth News magazines. When a girlfriend invited me to help with her father’s fall honey extraction while I was living in Nova Scotia, that was it, …
I was given the opportunity to take a look at The Beginner’s Guide to Beekeeping early in the summer, and being a beginner beekeeper myself, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. The book is written by Samantha and Daniel Johnson, a brother/sister duo who …
I’ve just had a look at a new book called “Keeping Bees”, by Pam Gregory and Claire Waring (the book is part of Flame Tree Publishing’s Green Guides series). Claire Waring was a contributing writer to The Beekeeper’s Bible, which I read and thoroughly enjoyed …
Okay, so that title is a tad cheesy, but it was late when I was writing this. I did my annual mason bee house-keeping a little late this year, but things were looking pretty good despite the neglect. We seem to have had quite a few new …
If you’ve watched the news at all in the past couple of years, you undoubtedly will have heard that bee populations have been dying out for reasons unknown. I was told by a local bee keeper this spring that our area actually suffered a 100% …
Waking up to a dusting of snow yesterday just about drove me around the bend, but the weather today more than made up for it – I even put my seedlings outside so they could sunbathe for a while this afternoon. We spent most of …
We’ve experimented with adding several different kinds of beneficial insects to our garden community over the years. We introduced ladybugs one spring and had fun watching them multiply by the hundreds over the summer (click here to see our photos of the ladybug lifecycle in …
Today I finally got around to doing the long overdue cleaning of the mason bee house. I put a bee house in our yard a couple of years ago hoping to help increase the numbers of these threatened pollinators, and with the hope that their …