After receiving a degree in horticulture from UW Madison, Kim Flottum worked four years in the USDA Honey Bee Research Lab in Madison, studying pollination ecology. After that, he spent two years raising acres of fruits and vegetables in Connecticut, where bees played a large role. He brings this experience, plus over 30 years of writing and editing articles for beekeepers in the monthly magazine Bee Culture. He has published books on honey bee pests and diseases, marketing, queen production, beekeeping history, beginning beekeeping, and and three editions of the classic industry reference, The ABC & XYZ of Bee Culture. With Marina Marchese, President of the American Honey Tasting Society, he co-authored The Honey Connoisseur, the first book of its kind published in English. In 2019 he and co-host Jeff Ott started a beekeeping podcast that can be found at www.beekeepingtodaypodcast.com, and is sponsored by Bee Culture magazine. This weekly podcast has interviewed over 150 honey bee scientists, commercial and hobby beekeepers, equipment manufacturers and other industry professionals. By mid-2021 there has been over 300,000 downloads. He and Jim Tew, a regular contributor to Bee Culture magazine started in 2020 another podcast called www.HoneyBeeObscura.com, supported by BetterBee Beekeeping Supplies, where, every Thursday morning, they discuss some beekeeping problem, event or adventure. His 4th Edition of Backyard Beekeeping continues as a leader in basic beekeeping books. In 2021, with Stephani Breaneu, they put together yet another book on the fundamentals of Natural Beekeeping, with an eye of many hive styles, and natural ways to deal with the stresses and rigors of a honey bee's life. Common Sense Natural Beekeeping was released in October, 2021. In February, 2022, he started another podcast, supported by Growing Planet Media, the father of all three of his podcasts. This one, sponsored by Northern Bee Books in the UK, is a book review podcast, looking at new and old beekeeping books. It runs at the beginning of the BeekeepingTodayPodcast every other week, on Monday mornings. Another new feature of the BetterBeekeepingPodcast in the addition of a Blog by the hosts, renewed fairly regularly on the webpage, on topics not quite the same as those on the podcast, and Jim Tew has started a blog on the Obscura web page also that covers current topics on that podcast.
