The Opportunity

12/3/2012

So recently my family and I were given an opportunity...
An opportunity that got our hopes very high.
It was the opportunity to start our lives over in a new state, with a better paying job for my wife, and potential financial backers for my brewing hobby.

We packed up everything we owned and pounced on this opportunity, we had been looking for a way out of the trailer park, and out from under the ever increasing lot rent payments, and of course people interested in taking my hobby to a profession hit a cord as well!

If things ever went according to plan, I would be thoroughly shocked....

So here we are living in Sheboygan WI, everyone is a touch happier than they were, my wife is vying for a permanent position at the factory she got into through a temp agency, and we are free of the trailer in Goshen, IN.

But as for the business potential on my brewing hobby, well that has been put on hold. However it has afforded us a unique opportunity to start keeping our own bees!

One of Sarah's co-workers, was talking with her about our goals with the mead and asked her "Why don't you keep your own bees?"  She answered very simply that we didn't have the land to put them on, and he said that he had 75 acres we could put hives onto the following spring!

Of course, I didn't have any beehives, and hadn't done any beekeeping since high school, but that hasn't stopped me. I put out word to friends and family that I was looking to start keeping my own bees.  Soon my father came to me and said I found patterns for hives, they will cost $35 for the patterns and said that I could just pay him for the lumber.  I commissioned for hives! They are on my back porch awaiting the bees I reserved for this upcoming spring.

And now a friend in Michigan has offered up enough hive boxes to easily build 4 more hives. My father has volunteered(for the cost of gas), to go pick them up for me and drive them from Michigan to Wisconsin, after he makes sure they all have bases, lids, and extra honey boxes. This doubles my hives and brings me up to 8!

So in a very short span of time I became a "Bee-man", and I haven't even picked up a bee smoker since I was 18 years old!
Just always remember every failure has an equal measure of opportunity, sometimes you just have to look a little deeper than your accustomed to allowing yourself to see.