We run 5 hour beekeeping courses aimed at teaching people how to keep bees at home
Courses cost $200 per person and are capped at 5 participants
To book into a beekeeping course: Email us via this contact form. On the form you will find the course dates and start times. We will hold your place on you chosen course dates for 3 days and provide you with the bank details for payment.
8 Frame Honey provide educational workshops with a focus on keeping bees at home. We run our courses just outside of Canberra (20 minutes north of the city). Handling bees for the first time is a mixture of excitement, fear, exhilaration and nerves. Our beekeeping courses provide you with enough information to set up and start managing your own colony of bees. As a result they are hands-on, fun and educational. We run courses between October and April each year. During the cooler winter months between May and September (yes it’s still cool in Canberra in September) we do not open the beehives. Therefore, we don’t offer courses during these times.
To ensure participants receive as much hands on time as possible we limit our workshops to a maximum of five people.
What you can expect to learn during a beekeeping course
You will learn about the types of hives available, the main differences between hives, which hives are suitable for you, the protective equipment needed to start bee keeping, when and how to inspect your hive, what to look for and how to extract honey from your hive. Because the emphasis is hands-on learning, the majority of the workshop is spent outside inspecting hives.
Participants can expect to undertake several full hive inspections. This also includes assessing colony health and strength, disease checks and discussions about the resources available to the bees at the time. Each participant can expect to suit up in protective equipment (provided by us), open a hive, use a smoker to calm the colony (if required) and remove and inspect frames from the hives. Finally, if the bees have produced enough honey at the time of the workshop, participants are able to extract a frame of honey. Otherwise, we demonstrate how to extract honey using $50 worth of equipment. Consequently we hope that by doing the course you save yourself several hundred dollars by not going out and buying an expensive extractor when you first start out as a beekeeper.
Who enjoys our educational workshops?
There are many reasons people attend our educational workshops, below are some of the reasons:
- Firstly, people who have considered keeping bees at home are idea candidates to complete our courses. Learn about beekeeping before spending a significant amount of money setting up a colony
- People who love honey and know it tastes better when it is produced at home or locally and isn’t heat treated
- Parents and children who are bonding while engaging in a shared passion or learning a new hobby
- People who understand how important bees are to our food production and want to help increase our bee populations
- Couples looking for unique dating experiences
- Gardeners who want to increase the yields of their own fruit and vegetable gardens
- People who are fascinated by bees
- Finally, people who want to an interactive and unique experience
Course dates and how to book
All courses start at 8am and finish at 1pm. The dates for the 2023/24 beekeeping season commencing in October have now been released!.
To book into a course: Email us via this contact form and we will hold your place on a course and provide you with the bank details for payment.
Our beekeeping courses make great gifts! Therefore why not purchase a gift voucher from here.
Read what past course participants have said about our courses on our testimonials page.