Hi folks! I’m Ron Miksha and I write most of the stuff you’ll read here on The Bad Beekeeping Blog. I was a commercial beekeeper for a dozen years or so, then became a hobby beekeeper when I got a real job later in life. I’ve kept bees in Pennsylvania, Saskatchewan, Florida, Wisonsin, and Alberta. And opened hives in half a dozen countries and three continents. But none of this means that I know much about bees. Use advice and ideas you find here with caution. Bees are unpredictable, climates and locales vary, and some of what you see here might not even be legal in your backyard. I live in Calgary (Canada) and I’ve been posting my musings and nonsense to the ‘net for over 20 years. Hope you find something you like here.
This site, the Bad Beekeeping Blog, is slowly replacing badbeekeeping.com – an old beekeeping site I built long ago. My intention is to move most of the old pages here. Eventually. Someday. Maybe. Meanwhile, this WordPress site is the place to bee. I’ve had a bit of feedback that the old site doesn’t play well on devices other than PCs and laptops, hence this migration.
The old site, badbeekeeping.com, has been around ever since the internet was discovered. (Actually since October 1995.) and there are a lot of goodies still sitting over there. The site was originally named The Beekeeper’s Home Pages and sat on Compuserve. I built my own domain and for a while housed it on an old machine in the back room. I kept dragging the content along whenever things changed, as it appears I am doing once again.
If you like what you read here, you may also like my book, Bad Beekeeping. It’s a story about keeping a few hundred hives and hauling them around North America, chasing the blossoms of apple trees, orange trees, alfalfa, and clover. In the book you’ll meet an elderly lady from Illinois who grew citrus crops in Florida (and went to school with Ronald Reagan), a native Cree cowboy who ranched in Saskatchewan (and had sons playing in the NHL), and a whole group of people who dressed in black and farmed together in one huge colony (and sang country songs in the evening). You will also meet a lot of other folks – and you may even learn a bit about beekeeping. Hope you’ll enjoy it!