Natural Beekeeping

Beehive choice is also a beekeeping philosophy choice. 

New to beekeeping or a traditional beekeeper, purchasing a Warre Beehive for your bee apiary will in effect mean you are adopting a natural beekeeping approach. 

You might well be visiting Cornwall for your Christmas holidays, if so and you’re interested in viewing and knowing more about Warre Beehives and natural beekeeping, please do call to arrange a visit.

Happy Christmas.

What can you give a beekeeper for Christmas. A Warre Beehive would be great if your certain the Christmas present recipient is serious about natural beekeeping.

Another surprise could be honey bee friendly flowers. Recently I found an excellent website www.reallywildflowers.co.uk. See their collection for bees. This would certainly be colourful presents for the bees, beekeeper and gardener alike. Guess what my neighbours are getting from Father Christmas.

It’s winter and it’s time to brush up on our beekeeping reading.

American (AFB) and European Foul Brood (EFB) are both subject to statutory control and, as natural beekeepers, we need to inspect for these serious diseases in our hives.

Thankfully, the guidelines from the website http://secure.fera.dera.gov.uk/ beebase/index.cfm, known to Beekeepers as the National Bee Unit, is that you should examine your colonies specifically for these brood diseases at least twice a year. Not every week.

This fits in nicely with our minimal beehive intrusions of Autumn checking stores for the bees and the Spring addition of boxes to allow the colony to expand.

Our Warre beehive inspections also include:-

• Studying the bees’ behaviour at the hive entrance
• Comparing the bees’ behaviour between hives
• Internal hive inspection if sudden and uncharacteristic bee behaviour is noted

This approach means ours and your Warre Beehives can be monitored with:-

• Minimum interference
• The bees left to create their best healthy environment
• Your being able to judge the wellbeing of the bees in your Warre beehive

Beehive inspection can be a controversial subject. Honestly, we do think the practice of weekly inspections is not helping our bees – in-fact, it’s known not to be – and this is one of the reasons why we adopted the Warre beekeeping method.

We do think knowing the health of our bee colonies is important. Are the above measures good enough? Well, yes, not as detailed as a framed National Hive inspection perhaps, but good enough to make a judgment and spot diseases such as Foul Brood.

Any questions please always call.