Our first encounters with honeybees were sometime ago, most likely in Africa. Someone discovered - probably simultaneously - why these tree-dwelling insects produced a sweet, sticky substance unlike any kind of, and they had stings in their tails.
When fire became portable, some other person discovered that smoke caused bees in order to become more amenable to robbing.
A while later, a more settled tribe unearthed that they might house bees in baskets or pots, which saved them the trouble of climbing trees to obtain the honey, additionally the craft of beekeeping was created. Pots, baskets and logs continued being used for all centuries, even though proficient beekeepers will have understood a large amount of the behaviour of their charges, the inner secrets regarding the hive remained closed from observers before the end of this 18th century, when a blind Swiss because of the name of François Huber found them out through the medium of his faithful - and sighted - servant, Burnens. Huber's New Observations on the Natural reputation for Bees remains a vintage to this day.
Some three decades later, Jan Dzieraon developed Huber's experimental hive further to generate the first truly practical, movable-frame beehive, and shortly afterwards in 1852, Rev. Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth publicized and patented his own version. Such was his talent for publicity and marketing that the 'Langstroth' became and continues to be the standard hive in the USA additionally the model upon which most other variants are based.
However, this sort of hive is expensive to get, very hard for amateur woodworkers to create - as a result of the precise dimensions and lots of small parts needed for frames - requires constant maintenance, causes great disturbance to the lives of bees, and is heavy and cumbersome being used. Lots of women, especially, have now been put off beekeeping by the weight-lifting necessary to harvest honey from a Langstroth-type hive, and hernias are commonplace among commercial beekeepers.
In Nepal, honey-hunting is still practised by men descending cliffs on ropes and using long poles to dislodge chunks of comb. Elsewhere, bees are kept in skeps, baskets, pots, cavities in walls along with other containers devised from local materials and - we are able to deduce from their longevity - more-or-less suitable both for bees and for their keepers. In Africa, probably the original home of the honeybee, the most notable bar hive was developed as an 'intermediate technology' solution, with the capacity of being constructed using local skills and materials and being, in essence, a beekeeper-friendly hollow log, obtaining the benefits of movable combs but without the need for machine-made parts.
Regardless of the accommodation we provide them, our meetings with bees will always be an activity of negotiation, albeit somewhat one-sided. We can protect ourselves from their website, nevertheless they ultimately haven't any defense against us. The encroachment of chemical agriculture, deforestation and urbanization have reduced their natural habitat, while toxic cocktails of insecticides have poisoned their flowers.
The honeybee has come to be noticed given that 'canary into the coal mine' of our civilization and she is showing early warning signs and symptoms of her imminent demise, to which we must pay urgent attention.
Our challenge now is to re-negotiate our relationship with bees: we should figure out how to protect and nurture them, in the place of simply exploit them, and we also should try to learn to listen to what they desire from us. The entire process of discovering the way we can most effectively do that is the project that myself and others have set ourselves, and we hope that many more will join us and carry this work forward.
We acknowledge the paradox inherent within the phrase 'natural beekeeping': as soon even as we consider 'keeping' bees, we start to stray from what is truly 'natural'. In general, only bees keep bees.
To be viewed 'natural', our beekeeping practice must take under consideration:
the natural impulses and behaviour of bees, including - foraging, swarming, storing food and defending their nest
how hive design affects bees
the suitability of materials used in hive construction, including considerations of sustainability
the nature and frequency of your interventions
the impact of a localized upsurge in honeybee population on other types of pollinators
the balance between honey harvesting plus the bees' own needs
the character of every added inputs - medications, feeding
Our company is involved with an ongoing process of working towards the ultimately unattainable notion of completely 'natural' beekeeping, while acknowledging that the bees will go their very own way no matter our wishes. Our relationship using them is the fact that of facilitator or minder instead of 'keeper'. We're able to say that the role of this natural beekeeper is to enable our bees to ultimately achieve the fullest possible expression of the bee-ness while in our care.
Our overall goal in natural beekeeping is to achieve a situation of sustainability: balancing inputs and outputs in a way that our activities enhance as opposed to damage the healthiness of our bees, other species additionally the planet.
To be truly sustainable, a method should be as close to carbon-neutral as possible, requiring no synthetic inputs and achieving no detrimental effect on the natural environment. So if our company is to carry on to have a relationship with honeybees, we have to considercarefully what impact current beekeeping practices have and how our 'natural' approach seeks to enhance with this state of affairs.
An average commercial beekeeping operation is an actual energy hog. Lumber - that might or might not come from sustainable sources - is sliced and milled by powered machinery prior to assembly into hive boxes, that are transported by road, sea or rail to be further distributed by road for their apiary sites. Regular visits by beekeepers require oil-derived fuel, and much more will become necessary to fire the boilers to heat the considerable degrees of water required for sterilizing woodwork and washing down de-cappers, extractors, tanks and floors. More power is required to retrieve the crop, to extract it and also to mix and distribute the sugar syrup required for the bees' survival after the elimination of their stores. Honey must then be filtered, bottled and distributed to wholesalers and thence to retail outlets. Meanwhile, beeswax is recovered in the shape of steam or boiling water, cleaned and filtered and sent off to be re-melted and converted into sheets of foundation, which are then sold returning to the beekeepers for insertion into frames for next season.
Migratory beekeepers in the USA truck hives by the thousands clear in the united states for the almond pollination, within the UK this kind of activity is nowadays largely restricted to taking hives as much as the moors in August for the heather crop, plus some orchard pollination work.
Because of what might be called the Langstroth hegemony, this whole scenario can also be enacted in miniature by amateur beekeepers, who largely mimic those activities of their commercial brethren. They could have only a few hives in the bottom of the gardens, however in most cases they will have not considered what other towards the expensive, energy-hungry equipment offered by the glossy catalogues associated with the beekeepers' suppliers.
We know that bees need nothing alot more than a dry, ventilated cavity by which to create their nest. Instead, 'modern' beekeepers insist on supplying all of them with a box packed with wooden frames, for which are mounted sheets of wax, helpfully imprinted with oversized 'worker-bee' hexagonal cell bases. A newly-hived swarm of bees needs to be surprised indeed to get so much done for them: ready-made comb bases hung in neat rows, with spaces all over them for access - what a boon for a busy colony!
Exactly what may to start with sight seem to be a good convenience, has also some significant drawbacks. Each one of these imprinted cells are exactly the same size, yet those who have observed natural comb understands that cell sizes vary considerably, and not between workers and drones: worker cells themselves vary in diameter in accordance with rules only bees know about. All those dead-straight frames may look neat, but bees don't build dead-straight comb - they like a gentle curve here and there. If you watch bees building natural comb in an unrestricted space, they hang in chains, legs linked, as if laying out the dimensions of this comb in space while they work above their particular heads - something they can't do on foundation.
So a good deal of so-called 'modern' beekeeping - in reality, virtually unchanged because the mid-19th century - is unsustainable from our point of view, in addition to being a nuisance to bees. In terms of honey yield, it really is clearly a marked improvement on logs and skeps, however in regards to bee health and energy savings, it offers turned out to be a tragedy.
The work of this natural beekeeper is to look for methods of interacting with bees that are truly sustainable, both for the bees themselves and also for the planet.
Into the Barefoot Beekeeper, I proposed the following three, simple principles for the 'natural' beekeeper to take into account:
Interference within the natural lives for the bees is kept to the absolute minimum.
There is nothing placed into the hive that is regarded as, or apt to be harmful either to your bees, to us or even to the wider environment and absolutely nothing is applied for that the bees cannot afford to lose.
The bees know what they are doing: our job is always to tune in to them and provide the optimum conditions with their well-being, both inside and outside the hive.
These principles seem to me to form an excellent foundation for our thinking about how precisely we approach bees and beekeeping. As soon even as we step beyond those basic principles and attempt further to define the parameters, we find ourselves at risk of just starting to create a 'book of rules'. And it does not take much looking around the globe right now to observe how divisive and destructive other 'books of rules' have already been.
'Natural', 'balanced' or 'sustainable' beekeeping - whatever name we give it - is an activity, not a destination. We have to remain flexible and always be on the lookout for methods to improve our techniques, so everything in this book is available in this spirit: indications of what appears to work, always aided by the possibility that there are even better ways yet to be discovered, or - more likely - re-discovered, as there is practically nothing new in beekeeping.
Historically, we began our relationship with bees when somebody unearthed that the taste of honey was worth the pain sensation it cost to harvest. We became honey-hunters, and while there were handful of us and several of those, this is sustainable.
When somebody found that it had been possible to offer shelter to honeybees as they made their honey, and then kill them off to raid their stores, we became bee keepers, even though there were few bee keepers and several honeybees, that too was sustainable.
Then someone invented ways to house bees that would not require them to be killed, but instead allowed people to manage and control them to some degree, arranging things in order to trick them into producing more honey due to their masters compared to themselves, and we became bee farmers. And therefore was sustainable for a while since there were still most of them and though there were also most of us, we're able to manipulate their reproduction in order to make more of them once we needed.
Now this has become clear that individuals have gone too much, for bees have started to suffer from diseases that have been virtually unknown back many years ago, and they have to be provided with medicines so that them alive. And because a whole industry has exploded up around the farming among these bees, and there's big money at stake, beekeepers have already been slow to change their ways and several could not do so for concern about bankruptcy, and so the health associated with the honeybees is becoming worse and they're subject to parasites and viruses that never troubled them in the past.
Meanwhile, we forgot just how to grow food in the manner that individuals once had done because we were not any longer inclined to labour into the fields, and instead devised clever approaches to make the soil support more crops. We poured fertilizers onto our fields and killed off inconvenient creatures with 'pesticides' - defining a whole class of living organisms as our enemies and for that reason dispensable. This is never sustainable, and never could be.
Which is where we find ourselves today, and also this may be the problem we face: bees have grown to be weakened through exploitation and a toxic agricultural system, allied towards the impossible expectation of continuous economic growth.
As 'natural beekeepers', our most pressing tasks are to bring back bees to their original, healthy state. We think about ourselves as 'keepers' in the feeling of 'nurturing and supporting' rather than 'enslaving'. We must seek to safeguard and conserve the honeybee by working inside their natural capacity, not constantly urging them towards ever greater production. We ought to challenge the complete agricultural and economic climate which includes caused us to arrive at this time, because without change at that level, the long run both for us as well as the bees is bleak.
We can make a start with re-establishing more natural, non-violent ways of dealing with bees: neither we nor they have any need of routine or prophylactic 'treatments' with synthetic antibiotics, fungicides or miticides. We do not want to operate 'honey factories' - we could content ourselves with providing accommodation for bees in return for whatever they can manage to provide us with. In certain years, this might be almost nothing, whilst in others there may be an enormous harvest.
Such is nature: bees depend on honey due to their survival; we try not to.
In the event that price of returning bees to a situation of natural, robust health is just a little less honey on our toast, will it be not a worthwhile sacrifice?
