Natural Beekeeping Course continued - A Year in the Life of a Bee Colony in a Hollow Tree

1. Swarm cluster arrives in the Spring, a median of 200 - 300 meters from the mother colony.
2. They begin to make wax to hang the comb structure from the top of the cavity. Temperature is kept at 40 degrees C.
3. Bees forage up to 3 miles in every direction for water, nectar, pollen and resin.
4. Bees ripen the noey in the comb.
5. They beging reasring brood.
6. In the summertime, the brood is raised in a near constant temperature to ensure optimum development. Foraging continues. Nutritious honey and pollen with enzymes, trace elements and vitamins used to feed brood and workers, keep brood warm and make wax. Nest atmosphere of pheremones and antiseptic propolis.
7. Autumn time, lots of honey stored for brood raising and to keep the bees through the winter. Colony prepares for winter. Stores increase and number of bees decreases. The drones are "kicked out". Stocks of nutritious honey built up.
8. Winter time, the colony clusters in warm pocket under its stores, consuming the stores of homey and pollen to keep warm. Middle of the colony is kept at 40 degrees C.
9. Winter/Spring, brood rearing starts. Brood are fed on nutritious honey (commercial beekeepers take all the honey in autumn and feed their bees sugar syrup in spring, which will raise inferior health bees, fed on a junk food diet). During the spring, the bees raise brood, feed them keep the tempoerature constant and sustain the colony.
10. Late Spring, more brood are produced. The colony expands rapidly into empty comb. Foragers gather fresh nectar, pollen and water. When affluent enough in bees and stores to reproduce the colony, they prepare to swarm. Egg laying reduces, queen cells and drone cells are raised. New pollen and honey added to stores.
11. Queen stops laying to slim down for flight with swarm. Swarm bees are selected from older nurse bees and young foragers. The swarm will leave when the new queen larvae are capped.
12. Virgin queens hatch. Often the first out kills the others. Sometimes casts are sent off (small swarms with a young queen). Sometimes the worker bees will prevent regicide in order to allow for multiple swarms, particularly if the cavity they are in is too small, and honey bound with no space for expansion. Virgin queens are assisted by workers. The new queen will take a week to prepare, and then will take her mating flight. The new queen inherits half the origial colony of bees, with ready buylt combs, stocks of stores, sealed food and hatching brood. Egg laying is interrupted for 2 -3 weeks.

What Does a Colony Need?
1. It needs shelter from the elements, preferably a South facing entrance.
2. Location near forage. A variety of food sources. Food that has not been sprayed with pesticides. Not too close to competition.
3. Protection from predators, suitably thick walls, small entrances off the ground.
4. Seclusion, not too noisy, free from disturbances.
5. A suitably sized cavity with enough storage space to survive the winter. They need 20 litres of honey through the winter. Optimal size for a natural hive is minimum 40 litres with wall thickness 4-5 inches. Ideally they will require more space than this for expansion to about 60 litres. Bees should be left with plenty of honey to last them through the winter. We can then harvest some in the spring if they haven't used it all. Generally there will be quite a large surplus, unless it has been a particulary severe winter or poor summer.

Ideal Home
It should not be too close to the mother colony. A dry place, or at least possible toseal up any gaps. It should enable the bees to thermoregulate the nest. Space sufficient for expansion of colony. Anchors for comb structure to suit bees plentiful stores of nutritious food. Defendable entrance. The beehive should not be moved ideally. If you do move a beehive, you can mov e it up to 3 feet, or more than 3 miles. If you move it more than 3 feet, they will go back to the orignial hive site and not be able to find it. If you move it more than 3 miles they will have to adjust to new surroundings. They depend on landmarks for navigation and have a foraging radius of 3 miles.

Do Not
Open hives routinely,
Manipulate combs,
Top sugar,
Inhibit swarmiing,
Feed poor quality food,
Make multiple splits,
Keep crowded apiaries.

Do
Provide dry, warm, draught free hive
Reduce repari and heating costs to bees
Allow bees own pace
Let bees build freestyle comb
Ensure proper nutrition
Enable brood wax changes
Monitor entrance behaviour, floor debris, bees and comb
Intervene only when symptoms dictate

Natural Comb
Is sized to suit the colony requirements, with worker cells and drone cells (artificial comb foundation is sized for worker brood only, to inhibit drone cell production).

Natural Beekeeping
Enables colonies, communities and superorganisms to thermoregulate, live on their own honey, behave naturally, solve their own problems, raise brood as they require, including drones and queens.

Things that can go wrong in the hive
Physical damage to structure
Cooling/chilling of the brood - likely if you open the hive up and inspect frequently as do conventional beekeepers.
Insufficient space for adults and new brood
Loss of Queen
Brood disease - European Foul Brood, American Foul Brood (notifiable diseases)
Pests - Varroa mites, Small Hive Beetle, Mice, Birds
Chemical Damage - Varroacides (Formic Acid preparations), crop pesticides.
Diseases may be transmitted vertically through swarming, which tends to be benign pathogen transmission, and horizontally through bees drifting and robbing, which can transmit more virulent pathogens transmission. Beekeeping practices of moving frames rom hive to hive, manipoulating the bees, vcreating artifical colonies, merging colonies etc. increases the chances of horizontal transmission.

Natural Beekeeping

What is Natural Beekeeping? Before attending any beekeeping courses, I assumed that all beekeeping was natural, after all, what could be more natural than a colony of honey bees doing what they are supposed to, going about their business, collecting nectar and pollen from the flowers and making honey? How wrong I was, beekeeping methods vary from the completely natural, leave 'em alone to do there own thing methods, only taking from them any excess honey leftover after the winter season, to the commercial beekeepers "factory farming" methods with artificial breeding, culling of drones, use of artifical comb, chemical pest treatments, swarm prevention, stealing all their honey and feeding them sugar instead. there are various shades of grey in between, each with its pros and cons. Modern cpommercial beekeeping methods are one of the reasons (that and the widespread use of pesticides) that our honey bee populations are in decline, that whole colonies are dying off, that they are more prone to disease and parasites.

Rudolf Steiner warned of this over 80 years ago when he gave his lectures on bees, and he noted how the techniques and the mind sets of beekeepers effect the evolutionary process, and thus the survival of the species. He said:
"Onre is able to say - in the whole inter-relationship of the bee colony- of this organism- nature reveals something very wonderful to us. The bees are subject to forces of Nature which are truly wonderful and of great significance...It is becoming increasingly obvious today that wherever man clumsily interferes with these forces that he makes matters not better, but worse...Nature is everywhere hindered, though notwithstanding these hindrances, Nature works as best She may.
...One finds that calves bred from cows that have been brought to an excessive production of milk, are considerably weaker... in artificial feeding and breeding of bees things ar not so bad, mainly because the bee is an animal that always knows how to help itself, since it is much closer to nature than a cow, which really can't help itself that much when raised and treated in this way. And this ability to help itself out of difficult situations is a truly wonderful thing about a beehive...you will get on with bees only if yu go beyond the normal, basic understanding of things and actually begin to follow matters with an inner eye. The picture of things you get in this way is indeed wonderful. Using this type of insight you will have to say that a beehive is a total entity. You must try to understand it in its totality. And with such an entity the potential damage is not at all noticeable right away...There is no way, based on the current situation with artificail methods used in feeding and breeding bees, to predict what the significanceof these procedures will mean for the future fifty or sixty years, or even a century from now".

Well, now more than 80 years on, we can see that Steiner was right, with the current decline of the honey bee. I had booked on a conventional beekeeping course before I discovered (through the Demeter Trust, an Anthroposophic al Organisation, based o the works of Rudolf Steiner) that there was a Natural Beekeeping course running in the London area on a weekend that I just happened to be in London. So I booked on the course, and was very glad that I did, and that I atttended this course prior to going on the conventional beekeeping course. Otherwise, I think I may have been put off beekeeping. On the conventional course there was too much aggravation of the bees, too many bees getting squashed each time the hives were being opened and closed, the (as far as I can see needless) destruction and culling of drone cells just to check for mites, and being told that feeding the bees sugar syrup is just as good for them as their own honey (!!!??).
Having been on the Natural beekeeping course first, I knew there was an alternative, that it isn't necessary to aggravate the bees and stress them out by opening up the hives every week, that it isn't necessary to kill the drones, and that one can still get large quantities of honey from the bees in a good season without having to resort to feeding them junk food. Also, I knew that there were lots of diffferent types of beehives, not just the standard National Hive and WBC hive used by most conventional beekeepers. There were, however, good points to the Conventional beekeeping course, and I got hands on experience of the bees, which was lacking in the Natural beekeeping course (which was more about leaving them alone). Even if keeping bees in a totally natural way, one is porobably going to need to handle them, the combs, the hive, etc at some point, particularly if one inetnds to collect honey, and the conventional course allowed me to practice that and get used to handling bees without fear. I also got to see the Queens - something that one may never see if keeping bees the totally natural way. So I got someting positive from both courses, but if I hadn't been totally convinced by Natural Beekeeping after the first (Natural course) course, then I certainly was convinced after attending the conventional course. I do, however, feel that In need to know more, and have booked on a further Natural Beekeeping course with the "Barefoot Beekeeper" http://www.biobees.com/ to learn more about Top Bar hives.

Here are my notes from the Natural Beekeeping course run by the Natural Beekeeping Trust http://www.biodynamic.org.uk/events/natural-beekeeping-trust-events.html which concentrated more on the Warre Hive, an uporight top bar hive consisting of a number of topbar hives stacked on top of each other. See http://thebeespace.net/tag/emile-warre/

British bees are best to keep, as they are more suited to our climate, are more adaptable and can survive when other bees are failing. Italian bees are often imported because they are more gentle and more productive to begin with, but they can get more nasty and stingy after a couple of generations. Hybrids between British and Italian beescan be less adaptable and more bad tempered than British bees.
Bees naturally make wax combs, but this involves a lot of energy and therfore involves them consuming a lot of homey, so conventional beekeepers like to give bees artifical honeycombs called foundation, which is made of recycled bees wax and can be used again and again. However, use of the same wax foundation again and again can spread disease as teh foundation can become contaminated with chemicals or diseases. If foundation is moved from hive to hive,diseases are spread. Bee metabolism requires bees to make wax, if they don't it interferes with their health and functioning. Although the use of foundation doesn't stop them producing wax altogether, as bees draw out the foundation into full size cells, t does lessen the amount of wax they need to produce and afedts their communication. bees naturally work in pairs to produce comb - having a sheet of foundation in between prevents them from doing this.
When an adult bee hatches out from the pupa, the first thing it does is clean its cell with proplis. Propolis is antibacterial and antivirualand very important for bees. Cinventional beekeepers hate it because it is sticky and glues up the hives, making them difficult to ope and inspect. As the new bee's glands develop, theri first job is as a house bee, feeding the brood, receiving food from incoming foragers and when the wax glands are developed they begin building honeycomb. As their venom glands develop, they may become guard bees, and lastly, they become foragers.
The Queen is the only bee to lay eggs, after her maiden flight, during which she will have been mated by several (amybe several hundred) drones from different colonies. The eggs she lays will therefore be genetically diverse, providing there is sufficient genetic diversity in the area (something which artificial breedingseverely limits). Depending on genes, some bees will be better at some activities and others will be better at other activities. If the queen is not properly fertilised, her eggs will only produce drones, and if this continues, the workers may decide to replace the queen, if there are still sufficent female brood in the brood cells. They will do this by raising new Virgin Queens, by feeding some of the female brood with a specially enriched food that allows their ovaries to develop and therefore turn into queens rather than workers. They will produce a numebr of virgin quyeens or princesses, and teh best one will survive and get to become queen of the hive. In conventional beekeeping, beekeepers will often remove all queens apart from one or two,to prevent swarming. How can they be sure that they have left the best and strongest ones? Answer - they can't! The bees know best and left to their own devices they will make the wisest choice of queen.
Beekeeping is an ancient art, with rock paintings in Spain dating back 17,000 years depicting honey collectors. In the beginning baskets or skeps were used, which were kept in bee bowls (cabinets). Honey and bees wax were and still are used extensively in churches and religious ceremonies of all kinds, and most modern hives were designed by priests. Beekeepinh has been a traditional activity in monasteries, with the phrase "Sweetness and Light" referring to the honey and beeswax candle produced.

What are the causes of Colony Collapse Disorder in modern bee colonies?
1. Environmental factors such as climate and loss of biodiversity
2. Chemical factors, such as pesticides and plant protectino products
3. Biological Agents - varroa mites, bacteria, viruses, animals
4. Beekeeping and husbandry practices - feeding, migratory beekeeping, treatments, artificial breeding, importing foreign bees

To be continued...

Rudolf Steiner's Lectures on Bees

Bees, Wasps and Figs

Apart from their importance as specialist pollinators - without which 90% of our food crops wouldn't exist, as Rudolf Steiner said in his lectures on bees given in 1923 "it is truly something to marvel at how the bee sucks the honey nectar commonly available in nature, transforms it within itself, and produces honey, which is so extraordinarily useful for human life". Steiner talks about how the same process, albeit in a different and less developed form, is found in wasps, although we can't get anything similar from the wasp that can be beneficial to humankind. Steiner describes the gall wasp, who deposits her egg on an oak leaf, causing the entire leaf tissue to undergo a complete transformation. Around the wasp egg, , sticking out of the leaf, a gall is formed. The wasp, by placing its egg in the leaf, takes the substance that it needs from the plant at the time, and transforms it. Steiner goes on to describe how this process in wasps is used in Greece to sweeten wild figs, where the wild fig tree is very attractive to a certain type of wasp, which places its egg into the fig. The fig grower takes figs from the wild fig tree, and hangs them in his fig trees on which the figs need to be improved. The wasp eggs and larvae in the wild fig speed up their development, due to sensing that the wild figs are drying out, out and emerge as adults from the wild figs, and as a result of their early emergence are forced into creating a second brood, ths time laying eggs in the cultivated figs. These eggs don't achieve maturity, but the figs become twice as sweet and are enriched and improved. Steiner compares this to the honey making of bees - the wasp gives the figs added sweetness. A wasp is unable to produce honey the same way that a bee does, but it can transfer, during its reproductive cycle, the sweetness of honey to the fig. Steiner says "using natural processes, they can make possible a certain type of honey creation invlving the transfer of something from one fig to another. The bee is a creature that has developed its wasp like body to such an extent that it can carry on independently, away from the tree, the process that the wasp can only carry on within the tree itself."
Steiner, of course was writing a long time ago, and before the process of pollination was really understood. It is interesting to note that in all his lectures on the improtance of bees, their role as pollinators is not mentioned, yet that role is now known to be of prime importance to our planet and our survival. It was known by the fig growers that the wasps gave sometihing to the fig trees that improved the figs and allowed them to develop into ripe, sweet fruit, but it was not known exactly how the process worked. We now know that the wasp sweetens the fig throug the process of pollination. The Caprii fig, is a wild fig that grows in the Mediterranean region and Western Asia. It has no commercial value itself, but cultivation is essential to the development of the Symrna Fig. The Capri Fig produces three crops of figs a year. Figs are unusual in theat the flowers are produced inside the fruit, and a specially adapted wasp, the Blastophagena psenes crawls inside the fig to the flowers. The spring crop (called the profici crop)of figs contain staminate flowers and "gall flowers", which are similar to pistillate flowers, but have shor ovaries. The fig wasp enters the young figs and lays eggs in the gall flowers. After about two months, the next generation of wasps emerges, becoming covered in pollen in the process, and enters the sumer crop of figs, which contain mainly gall flowers. As the wasp enters the figs it fertilise the gall flowers with pollen. The wasp will lay eggs in some of the gall flowers, but not all - those with eggs will not grow fertile seeds due to the presence of the wasp larvae, but those that don't contain larvae will. Later in the aseason the winter crop of fruit develops and the wasps over-winter in the fruit. The cultivated Smyrna Fig produces no staminate flowers, and is therefore entirely dependent on cross pollination from the Capri figs. Branches of figs, containing wasp larvae and eggs, from the profici crop are suspended on the Smyrna fig trees by the grower. The emerging wasps enter the partly developed Smyrna figs and pollinate them, but are unable to deposit eggs in the correct location i the flowers, as they are a different shape to the flowers of the Capri figs, with longer stamens. The wasps then emerge from the fig, and will pollinate several figs looking for somewhere to deposit eggs. Smyrna figs have a better flavour and sweetness once fertile the seeds develop. Thus, like the bee, the wasp is an important pollinator and indirectly, produces a sweet substance by allowing the fertilised fig to develop.
Different insects are adapted to pollinate different types of plant, and the little fig wasp can get into places where bees can't - everything has its place in the balance of nature - but bees are the major type of pollinator in the ecosytem. Different species of bees too, are adapted to pollinate and suck nectar from different types of plant. It is important thererfore that all types of bees are protected, and helped to survive and proliferate, not just the ones that give us honey. And even the much maligned and hate wasp needs to be treated with some respect, as it is also has a role as a pollinator, and predator of garden pests.

The Wasp and the Bee - a Fable reprinted from Evenings at Home

A wasp met a bee, and said to her, "Pray, tell me what is the reason that men are so illnatured to me, while they are so fond of you? We are both very much alike, only that the broad, golden rings about my body make me much handsomer than you are: we are both winged insects, we both love honey, and we both sting people when we are angry; yet men always hate me, and try to kill me, though I am much more familiar with them than you are, and pay them visits in their houses, and at their tea table, and at all their meals: while you are very shy, and hardly ever come near them: yet they build you curious houses, thatched with straw, and take care of, and feed you i the winter very often: - I wonder, what is the reason?"
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The bee said "Its because you never do them any good, but, on the contrary, are very troublesome and mischievous; therfore they do not like to see you. But they know that I am busy all day long in making them honey. You had better pay them fewer visits, and try to be useful!

What is a bee?

Bees are vegetarian wasps!
Somewhere back in the mists of time, the ancestors of bees, wasps in the family Crabronidae preyed on other insects, but as pollen producing plants appeared, they adapted to eat pollen possibly, starting by eating smaller plant dwelling insects that were covered in pollen, but adapting to live on the pollen itself.  The earliest insect pollinated plants were thought to have been pollinated by other insects, such as beetles, but bees developed as specialized pollinators, and thus allowed the development and spread of flowering plants.  Bees and flowers developed together, and one could not exist without the other. A perfect symbiotic relationship. Bees developed behaviourally and physically to specifically enhance pollination and are more efficient at the task than any other insect, including butterflies and pollinatiing wasps.  The earliest bee fossil that has so far been found is 100 million years old embeded in amber