The Beginner's Guide to Beekeeping by Samantha Johnson and Daniel Johnson: Book Review

I’ve always had a bit of a fondness for bees, always wanted to keep them some day. I’m perhaps a little nearer to actually doing so than I ever have been before, but beekeeping is nevertheless an activity about which I know very little. Not nothing — I once went along to a couple of beekeeping trial sessions — but very little.

So of course what I need is a Beginner’s Guide to Beekeeping and Samantha Johnson and Daniel Johnson have written one. And, on the basis of my limited knowledge of the subject, very good it is too.

It isn’t exhaustive by any means, but it fulfils the function of an introduction — really readable, clearly illustrated and easy to understand. It covers all the questions I might have thought to ask and a whole lot of others that hadn’t occurred to me. And it covers everything from what type of bees there are and what they do, right the way through to how to build your own hive and how to produce and market your honey and beeswax.

It’s geared to the American beekeeper, so that a lot of it wasn’t relevant to me (I don’t need to worry about how to protect my hives from black bears, for example, or from temperatures of minus forty, and the regulations where I am will be different from those covered in the book). That didn’t matter. I still found it both interesting and enlightening.

I’ll have to wait a while before I get round to setting up as a beekeeper, if I ever do. But I feel a whole lot more confident about the project than I did before but if my dream becomes reality, this is the book I’ll turn to to start me off.

Thanks to Netgalley and Voyageur Press for a copy of this book in return for an honest review.