Beekeeping can bring so many benefits to your life, your health, your community and your environment. I gathered here my 7 favorite reasons to work with bees. I hope you’ll find at least one that inspires you to get started!

1- Increase your garden’s yield through pollination

First of all, as a homesteader, you know that pollination plays a big role in your garden’s production. You need a strategy to attract pollinators to get the best yield. Bees are essential partners for your garden to thrive. When you offer them a home and flowers to forage for, they give you back by generating abundance in your garden. It’s a win-win relationship.

2- Harvest your own organic honey

A second reason to get into beekeeping is to harvest your own local organic honey. When you buy honey at the grocery store, there is a chance that it comes from the other side of the world with lower production standards, it may not be real honey, it could be refined with sugar or flavored with corn-syrup, or its natural properties may have been altered (chemicals used to produce it, the way it was harvested, if it was overheated, etc.). There are many variables that could affect the quality of the product. By producing it yourself, or buying it directly from your local beekeeper, you will be confident you will be eating healthy honey.

3- Produce your own natural medicine

Honey is known to have great nutritional and medicinal properties. This gift from the bees is full of goodness. It’s one of these magic medicine that can heal you and your family from a lot of things.

4- Improve your food security

It’s a new step toward more autonomy in your food supply. Honey can get quite expensive these days. Who knows how prices are going to inflate and how supply chain is going to evolve in the coming years. Now producing your own honey, you are saving money and you have direct access to this food supply, straight from your garden.

5- Save money by lowering your property tax

Not only you are saving money in your food supply budget, you are also reducing your property taxes, thanks to the agricultural-exemption details in the Texas property code, you might be eligible to significantly reduce your annual property taxes paid if you have land in Texas!

6- Build a resilient and prosperous community

Producing honey is also a great way to build relationships in your local community. Making nature’s abundance available to your neighbours, family, friends will help you build a more prosperous and food resilient community. What goes around comes around. It’ll eventually benefit you and your family.

7- Become aware of your environment’s natural balance

Harvesting honey is also a way to better understand the natural balance of your environment and improve your relation to it. Bees are great indicators of how healthy your garden and surroundings are. You can only live prosperous in the long term if you create an harmonious environment around yourself. If you experience bee collapse, or sick bees, there might be something in your environment that could affect you and your family in the long term. Take into account these important signs to improve your food system’s health and therefore your own health.