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From crayons to cough drops, cookies to candles, Beehive Alchemy offers a comprehensive introduction to incorporating the miracle of bees into everyday life.
Beehive Alchemy is a continuation of Petra Ahnert's bestselling Beeswax Alchemy. With this new book, beekeepers (and bee lovers) will learn about the benefits and attributes of beeswax, honey, propolis, and more, alongside a full range of projects and techniques to process and harness the amazing gifts of bees. Inside, you'll find instructions to make Ahnert's award-winning hand-dipped birthday candles, the classic French dessert canelé bordelais, and much more, including:
The international bee crisis is threatening our global food supply, but this user-friendly field guide shows what you can do to help protect our pollinators. The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation offers browsable profiles of 100 common flowers, herbs, shrubs, and trees that attract bees, butterflies, moths, and hummingbirds. The recommendations are simple: sow seeds for some plants — such as basil, rhododendron, and blueberries — and simply don’t mow down abundant native species, including aster, goldenrod, and milkweed. 100 Plants to Feed the Bees will empower homeowners, landscapers, apartment dwellers — anyone with a scrap of yard or a window box — to protect our pollinators.
Bee populations are plummeting worldwide. Colony collapse disorder poses a serious threat to many plants that rely on bees for pollination, including a significant proportion of our food crops. Top bar hives are based on the concept of understanding and working with bees' natural systems, enabling top bar beekeepers to produce honey and natural wax while helping bees thrive now and in the years ahead.
Advanced Top Bar Beekeeping picks up where author Christy Hemenway’s The Thinking Beekeeper left off, providing a wealth of information for backyard beekeepers ready to take the next step with this economical, bee-friendly approach. Hemenway shares:
While continuing to emphasize the intimate connection between our food system, bees, and the well-being of the planet, Advanced Top Bar Beekeeping breaks new ground in the quest to shift the dominant agricultural paradigm away from chemical-laden, industrial monoculture and toward healthy, diverse local farming. See what all the buzz is about with this must-read guide for the new breed of thinking beekeeper.
Tony Pisano's step-by-step illustrated instructions show you how to build everything you need, including hive bodies, supers, covers, hive stands, frames, swarm catchers, feeders, and more.
This is a comprehensive, step-by-step guide to fully prepare your family for any cataclysmic event. Every year rivers flood, hurricanes strike, and earthquakes shake buildings to the ground. Catastrophic disasters can hit anywhere at any time. There’s simply no escaping them. The only reasonable thing you can do is get prepared. Accessible to absolute beginners, this guide to prepping shows how to create a self-sustainable home for surviving anything from a power outage to societal collapse. In just a few hundred well-thought-out pages, Countdown to Preparedness takes you and your family from clueless to completely ready.
Get all the animal know-how, big or small, with our Backyard Animals Package from Grit! Whether you're thinking about keeping chickens in your backyard, breeding rabbits in a colony, or raising barnyard animals, this package has you covered. Our limited-time package includes three specially curated issues from Grit, including Guide to Barnyard Animals, Guide to Chickens, and Guide to Backyard Rabbits, 6th Edition.
Curious about starting a homestead? Our Homesteader’s Starter Set is the perfect place to begin!
52 Homestead Skills follows homesteader Kimberlee Bastien, as she learns one homesteading skill per week over the course of an entire year. The book details all of Bastien’s adventures, from building a beehive and becoming a beekeeper to creating her own laundry and dish soap. Whether you already live on a homestead, are transitioning onto one, or are only thinking about it, 52 Homestead Skills will help turn your dreams into a life worth living.
Packed with skills such as making deodorant, building a chicken chunnel, and freezing jam, the 52 projects in this book will prove helpful to any homesteader!
Learn everything you need to know about keeping chickens on your homestead in Raise Backyard Chickens!
Whether you live on 1,000 acres or 1,000 square feet, there’s plenty of room in your backyard for a flock of chickens. Join the chicken revolution today and be prepared to reap a lifetime of benefits that goes far beyond the enjoyment and the eggs.
This book will help get you started with everything from incubating fertile eggs to receiving and raising day-old chicks to building a chicken coop to keeping your birds safe and healthy. You’ll find top-notch advice on how to protect your flock from predators, produce the healthiest eggs, and so much more.
Have you heard the buzz about keeping bees on your homestead?
In Raise Backyard Bees, you will find beekeeping information on building beehives, installing bees in the hive, gathering up a swarm, breeding queen bees, caring for your bees, harvesting honey, and processing honey for sale.
You’ll meet people who dreamed of becoming beekeepers for years before taking the plunge, people who have been working with bees for decades, and people who inherited their love of bees from family members. We’ve even included a few recipes in which you can use your freshly harvested honey for delicious results.
The Homesteader’s Starter Set is the perfect opportunity to make your homesteading dreams a reality!
Ready to take your beekeeping skills to the next level? In Business with Bees provides the answers you need.
“The only way to save the honey bee is to save the beekeeper. All the rest comes second,” says best-selling author and beekeeping expert Kim Flottum. In this book, Flottum shows you how to save bees, beekeepers, and your business. He’ll takes serious beekeepers past the early stages and learning curves and offer practical, useful advice for converting your their passion into a part-time or full-time career with measurable results.
This beekeeping business how-to guide offers all of the in-depth answers to the questions you didn’t know you had.
• Writing a business plan
• Finding the best sources for funding
• Determining what your facilities will be and how to acquire them
• Getting and installing the right equipment
• Cooperating with other local businesses
• Promoting your business and measuring success
• And much more!
With this expert advice you can become as knowledgeable, confident, and successful in running a business as you are in beekeeping.
Learn natural beekeeping from Europe's foremost beekeeping authority. Georges de Layens, inventor of the world's most popular horizontal hive, shares a lifetime of experience on how to get started in simplified beekeeping; choose the best hive model for you and your bees; manage your hives with just two visits per year; take advantage of horizontal hives and deep frames, and much more.
Keeping Bees in Towns and Cities features everything an urbanite needs to know to start keeping bees: how to select the perfect hive, how to buy bees, how to care for a colony, how to harvest honey, and what to do in the winter. Urban beekeeping has particular challenges and needs, and this book highlights the challenges and presents practices that are safe, legal and neighbor-friendly.
The text is rounded out with profiles of urban beekeepers from all over the world, including public hives at the Maryland Center for Horticulture; beekeeping on an office balcony in Melbourne, Australia; and a poolside hive at a hotel in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Bees need our love and attention! Bee colonies are fast declining, and it’s up to us to help our buzzing buddies recover and thrive.
In Love Bees: A Family Guide to Help Keep Bees Buzzing, Vanessa Amaral-Rogers focuses on how we can help our nectar-collecting buddies flourish. Through a whole swarm of engaging facts and fun activities, she reveals why these important insects are so awesome.
Teach your kids that conservation is cool, and show them what rules to follow to become a bee’s BFF (Best Friend Forever)! Find out together how to make a bee hotel or B-line nectar corridor, and play the Waggle Dance board game. Add exciting lessons in natural history and gardening, from planting pollinator-friendly flowers to the basics of urban beekeeping. This is a call to action with a positively sunny outlook.
In recent years, as increasing factors threaten the world’s honeybees, beekeeping has gained new interest and new respect. Mother Earth News has joined in the fight to save the honeybee and other pollinators, and in these pages you will find advice, tips, and personal experiences from novice to expert beekeepers from every walk of life and from every corner of the country.