About | The Bee Bible

What this site is

The Bee Bible is a complete beekeeping manual written for Australian conditions: Australian rules, seasons, products and pests. It covers everything from deciding whether beekeeping suits you to queen rearing and running more hives. The information is for everyone who keeps bees, whether you have one hive or many.

The manual is organised into these sections:

Getting Started: everything to know and have before your first hive.
Hive Management: running healthy hives through the year.
Pests, Diseases & Biosecurity: current threats, state rules and official advice.
Advanced Beekeeping: queen rearing, breeding and scaling up.
Gear Guides & Reviews: research-based reviews and buying guides.
Reference: glossary, calendar, clubs and checklists.

The site is run by an Australian hobby beekeeper as a shared resource, not a personal blog.

How pages are researched and checked

Every guide follows the same process before it is published:

Research from trusted sources. Facts come first from official sources: the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, state agriculture departments, BeeAware and Plant Health Australia, and the APVMA for registered treatments. Research and industry bodies such as AgriFutures Australia, universities and beekeeping associations come next. Books and experienced beekeepers' guides are used for support only, never as the sole source of a fact.
Two independent sources for every fact. A fact that can't be confirmed by two sources isn't published.
A separate fact-check. Each page is checked by a separate review step from the one that drafted it. Anything the sources disagree on, or that can't be confirmed, is removed or held back for review.
Sources listed. Every guide lists its sources at the bottom, so you can read the original advice.
Dated. Every guide shows when it was last reviewed.

Pages in Pests, Diseases & Biosecurity change more often, because official advice changes. These pages are checked against official sources every week and show both a "Last checked" and a "Last changed" date. No change goes live until it has been reviewed.

Not official advice

The Bee Bible is not a government website. Rules for registering hives, moving bees and treating pests are set by each state and territory, and they change. Always follow your state agriculture department.

How the site is funded

The manual is free to read. In future the site may show advertising and include affiliate links to products on Amazon Australia, which pay a small commission at no extra cost to you. Neither will decide what the manual recommends. Product reviews are research-based and scored by a published method. Theaffiliate disclosure explains how this works.

Spotted a mistake?

If something is wrong or out of date, please say so through the contact page. Include the page and, if you can, a source. Corrections are checked against the sources above before the page is changed.