Our household has decided to become beekeepers. This is happening for several reasons: We want to help strengthen the city bee population, we want our garden and our fruit trees to get better pollination, and we like the idea of honey production/learning about bees. We have no experience with this sort of thing, but we do have a beekeeping mentor, Corky Luster from Ballard Bee Company ("Keeping the Bee in Ballard").

We are in his three-part class at Seattle Tilth, and he tells us what stuff to get and also takes our confused questions by phone. Hubby has been assembling the hive boxes in his shop:

The bees are arriving this weekend, and we will need to get a few thousand road-weary/mad/scared bees from their travel containers into the hives. Wish us luck!