No they never assigned us a mentor they told us to get one though. There's 3 people that won. They made us write an essay on why we wanted to keep bees so my wife wrote the essay and my youngest daughter drew a picture. And we had to attend a short course. There were 10 people who wrote an essay. The other seven people that didn't win got $150 credit back towards their first bees. The three of us that did win we get to go to a workshop to put together are hives and paint them. The bees that I ordered for my old box I won't get them until the first week of May. The bees that came with the Beehive that we won I don't know when we get those.