Welcome to Dandelion Apiary!

We've decided to make an online presence for our hobbyist bee yard, which we affectionately call Dandelion Apiary.

Why would we name our apiary after a pervasive weed?

I'm glad you asked!

Dandelions are the first food source of our honeybees when they start emerging in the very early spring. It also happens to be a very apt description of most of our yard-- of which, we're quite proud. While I don't often see our honeybees on our dandelion-infested lawn (they have better food sources or, at least, closer dandelions), we do see a lot of pollinators enjoying those first bursts of yellow. We also happen to think the idea of pouring chemicals all over the place just to mimic a golf course is a little silly. And expensive.

Not that anyone gets into beekeeping because they are miserly, mind you. It's a shockingly expensive hobby at times and one that will consume an entire afternoon before you can yell "WHY IS THE SMOKER OUT AGAIN!?" three times.

Fortunately the bees to make some useful and potentially lucrative byproduct, most notably, HONEY. We eat a ton of honey. I think the metric version of that is a crappe tonne of honey, but my French is slipping so I could be wrong.

Anyways, that's where you might come in, if you're a honey eater. We were able to consume all our honey in the first year but as we now stretch into year four...  we have a lot of honey. We need to sell some of it... Ok, a LOT of it.

Which brings me back to DandelionApiary.com, our new website. It's not going to be a big e-commerce superstore of Honey'N'At or anything, but it will give you an easy place to go when you decide your sweet tooth is craving something raw, natural and unmolested since it left the beehive. If you're in the northern 'burbs of Pittsburgh, we can probably work something out to get the honey to you. Typically, we price it about $10/pound and sell it in 1.3 pound mason jars-- but wait, there's more!  We don't charge for the jars and the honey is $12. 

Pretty SWEET deal, eh?

But like I wrote above, this isn't just for sales. We'll be posting updates on the hives, bee lives and basically using this as an online archive of our beekeeping notes. Ask questions! We'll answer those too. Bees are fascinating and, at year four, we are darned near experts in knowing that we are still learning and making stupid mistakes. We'll share those too.

After all, we want everyone to love the honeybees, learn to appreciate their role on our planet and, of course, how to make use of ambitious production of wax and honey. Through all of that, I think we'll get to know each other and that's the cardinal rule of getting good honey: know thy beekeeper. We hope we can be YOUR beekeeper.

Thanks for reading and I hope we'll be seeing you back here.