To Bee or Not to Bee

OK, yes, that was lame. But it does kind of sum up the exploration I've undertaken over the last several months. I've been reading a lot about honeybees and beekeeping. It's hard to resist such an interesting undertaking and I'm still weighing different options. But it's seriously looking like we're going to become beekeepers along with a friend of ours. Ironically, just as I was deciding to go ahead and put a hive or two in our back yard, the Co-conspirator brought my attention to a news story about the city council considering an ordinance to expressly allow beekeeping in the city. Up until that point I had found nothing in the code that expressly prohibited it so I thought I'd just go ahead and do it without asking. Unfortunately, the proposed ordinance as it currently stands is a little too restrictive to let us place and maintain our hives as I was planning to. It was also around this time, I think, that I mentioned my beekeeping fantasies to a good friend of ours who also happens to be an entomologist. As luck would have it he's also interested in starting up and has connections to rural opportunities to place our hives. Problem solved.

It will be interesting to see how the ordinance shapes up. I feel it's kind of a cop-out to just go outside the city to avoid conflict altogether, but one look at the neighborhood list-serve reminds me how "engaged" some of neighbors are. Perhaps in the future when the ordinance is settled and we've got some big, healthy hives going we'll move some into town. For now we're going to just work on getting better educated and better connected to experienced beekeepers. We attended this month's meeting of the local beekeeping association and they seem like a friendly and knowledgeable bunch. I was relieved to find out we weren't the only "no-bees" at the meeting. So there's the big winter project. Stay tuned as the adventure unfolds!