Customer Reviews

The Backyard Beekeeper's Honey Handbook: A Guide to Creating, Harvesting, and Cooking with Natural Honeys

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have the utmost respect for Kim Flottum's work. However, this book does not meet its stated goals. Flottum describes the book as "not for the beginner." Why, then, does he spend so much time and space covering basic material? For his stated audience, there is no reason to spend pages explaining how honey is made, or how to extract honey, or what flowers make good honey. All of this information, and much more, can be found in any introductory beekeeping text.

For the beginner, this might make a useful addition to a starter beekeeping library, after you have picked up a copy of "The Hive and the Honey Bee." For the seasoned beek, this book is completely unnecessary.

I was initially a little hesitant to buy this book, given the mixed reviews at Amazon, but after receiving it and looking at it, I'm pleased that I did. It's a great follow-on book to Kim Flottum's first book, The Backyard Beekeeper, which gives good basic coverage to hive management practices, bee life cycle and diseases and parasites. This book solidly covers honey production, something that was left out of the first book. I was happy to find the chapter entitled "Guide to Honey Plants" with pictures for identifying common nectar sources, or more importantly, a guide on what to plant in my yard to keep my bees happy with nectar flows throughout spring and summer and make the kind of honey I like. The middle section of the book covers honey harvesting practices (removing bees, honey extraction, filtering, bottling). The last section has recipes for using honey - some look good or okay, some not so much. The last section is definitely not the strength of the book. As a hobbyist beekeeper with a handful of hives in my yard, this book is a great guide for the scale of honey production I am working with.

I found this book to be very informative. There is a lot of information and it is clear and easy to understand. It tells about the anatomy of the bees, where & why they forage, how to harvest the honey, what equipment you'll need and how to handle all of the above. It also comes with some quite good honey recipes. If you are interested beekeeping and honey this book will help you do it.

This book is ok. If you looking to learn about plants that the bees use to make honey or cooking with honey then this is the book for you. It has wonderful color photographs. I was looking for inside tips on honey production but I did not find anything helpful here.

Great book for all who wish to know about honey and bee basics, beautiful illustrations. However much of the content is well known to beekeepers, so if you are looking for a book with specialist information on honey and its characteristics, keep that in mind

The Backyard Beekeeper's Honey Handbook is an excellent sequel to the Backyard Beekeeper, both by Kim Flottum. The Honey Handbook offers quality information on producing artisan honey and methods that will be the best for harvesting honey to create that perfect jar. Reading this book will definately take your beekeeping experience to the next level. It's said that people get into beekeeping because of the bees but get out of it because of the honey, or harvesting it. Yes harvesting honey does take time but once you bottle it you have an excellent food source that won't ever spoil, is a natural sugar, and best of all the bees made it for FREEEEE!!!! This book is definately a reliable resource for your honey and beekeeping needs. I love mine and you'll love yours!

This book gives a comprehensive review of honey which should be of interest to both beekeepers and lovers of honey. It compares honey to wine and I know I have never considered this comparison before. It is surprisingly complete, innovative and out-of-the-box in it's approach. I highly recommend this informative and complete book. Excellent! I also recommend the authors other book called Backyard Beekeeper.