Hello and Welcome!
This is a great forum for learning more about bees and beekeeping. The tutorials on the main Beemaster page were one of the first places where I began learning about bees several years ago. Here in the forums, I use the 'search' function a lot: many times I can find immediate answers to my questions in previous threads.
Are you involved with a local beekeeping club? Clubs are good places to find mentors and get connected with nearby beeks. Plus, they often offer beginnning beekeeping classes:
Looking forward to hearing about your beekeeping adventures!
While I started beekeeping this past spring with two hives. Just checked on them this past week and both hives were dead, one starved the other I'm not sure (still plenty of honey). These were both Russian strains so I'm going to try again. I just ordered from Walter Kelly 2 packages, to be delivered March 28. I really got interested in raising bees after meeting a beek in Morris IL named Doit Ross. He gave me some equipment and told me where to start. Right now my main problem is finding land. I was keeping the hives on abandoned property that was overgrown, unfortunately that is also where the local kids go to hang out. They ended up throwing rocks at the hives and later spraying poison on them. That may be the reason they never made it this winter. Anyway I ended up moving them this past summer to my place in my station wagon (that was quite fun).
I seem to notice a lot of beeks live well into their 90s+, anyone else notice that?
Whenever I got stressed out about the bees I would just read Micheal Bush's web site, very informative. In fact that my be how I found this site.
Anyway it's the middle of maple tapping season here and I've got to get back to that, see ya'll later.