Allen asked a really good question about what we have learned from the Bee-L.
 I pose to you all this question:  How did you get into keeping bees?

Myself, I started in 1973.  My grandparents took me to the local extension
agent's office where there were pamphlets on beekeeping.  I was always amazed at
the observation hive at the local fruit market.  I got as many books about
beekeeping that I could get my hands on and read.  I saved enough all winter
long and ordered a complete beginners outfit from Sears. ( How many of you can
remember the Farm and Ranch catalog?)  My dad was friends with a beekeeper who
heard that I had orderd the kit and said that 1 swarm wouldnt do, and gave me
enough equipment to start 3 hives.  My first bees were orderd from the York Bee
Co.  Almost 30 years and 150 swarms later, I am still as amazed about the
whole beekeeping world as I was when I first started.
I also wonder what drives us to keep on going back to the hives.  Sometimes I
find a familar similarity in that we derive a sense of pleasure and worth
from earning some or all of our subsistence from nature.  How many of you on the
list have tapped a stand of maple trees for maple syrup, raised your own
livestock for the table, brewed your own beer, greeted the opening day of deer
season in a blind far away from where the road ends, with your children, ran a
trapline, chased behind baying coon hounds at 2 am in a woods that you think will
never end, planted a garden (big enough for you, your family, the neighbor
across the road and his dentist)?  There seems to be a common thread, be it
rural, suburban or urban that leads us back to pry the cover off to take just one
more look at the hives goings on.  Through the course of time I have learned
that for the most part we are a gentle bunch. Sometimes in life we move slow
and deliberate, just like we do with the bees. But more importantly, I find
myself humbled by things that I can't explain and sometimes things that I can,
when I lift that first cover off that first hive in one of my yards.  Its a
feeling that I hope that I never lose.  Anyways, I was just wondering what got you
started in beekeeping and what keeps your smoker lit to keep on doing it?

Bill Skriba
Ithaca, MI

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