BeeMused

Yesterday I attended yet another workshop on "Organic" beekeeping. When I say "Organic", I mean methods which avoid drugs and chemicals, and interfere as little as possible with the bees' activities. It's my third workshop, and I still have no actual bees! Well, there's always something new to be learned, and probably better done before the bees' depend on it!

A few years ago, I started getting interested in having honeybees. I didn't really pursue it much, being on a city lot and not even remotely sure where to start. I did discover that my great grandfather and my best friend's grandfather had both been backyard beekeepers, which I thought was both interesting and cool. But the setup of the Langstroth hives and all the suits and smoke and chemicals involved kind of put me off the entire idea of beekeeping...until I discovered that's not the only way to do it.

The first classes I took, which I've mentioned elsewhere in this blog, were on Top Bar Hives. The instructor, Will Dart, advocates a very non-chemical, low-invasion approach to beekeeping. He disdains all antibiotics and miticides/fungicides, and doesn't even advocate smoking the bees. He does, however, advocate harvesting the honey, which some organic beekeepers (or "bee guardians") view as something only to be done in the event of accidents or damage to the hive requiring removal of some comb. His approach used only Top Bar Hives, one of which I now own, though it's still empty of bees.

Yesterday's workshop was even more bee-oriented. It was taught at Friendly Haven Rise Farm, out in Venersborg, Washington. The owners of the farm, Jacqueline and Joseph Freeman, advocate a very bee-oriented approach to keeping bees, where the foremost question is always, "What is best for the bees?" They didn't advocate any particular style of hive, and we got to examine Langstroth, Top Bar, and Warre Hives (pronounced Wah-REH, and also known as Garden Hives.) I would definitely recommend this class to anyone who can manage to make it to the location; we had one attendee from Duvall, Washington, which is about a 4 hour drive. The farm owners do allow for overnight stays, so one possibility would be to arrive a day early, stay at the farm overnight, and then take the class the next day.

As part of the class, we went out to examine a Top Bar Hive that had tipped over in a windstorm a couple of weeks ago. As you might imagine, this was rather catastrophic for the bees. Jacqueline and Joseph tipped the hive upright, and replaced as much comb as possible, then just waited. In opening it yesterday, they were intending to move the brood, queen, and as much of the comb as possible to a new hive. The hive, however, had other ideas. Turns out they'd been busily repairing as much of the damage as possible, and were thriving. The queen was uninjured, and the bees were active and aggressive.

I was near the hive without a bee suit, and doing just fine until one of them pinged off my head and got caught in my hair. Fantastic. Poor little thing got all agitated, probably thinking it was trapped in a spiderweb, and as I tried to comb it out, it eventually just gave up and stung me right on the top of my head. Ow. Drat. Worst part was immediately after, when all the other bees smelled Eau du Dead Bee and kept bombing my head, checking me out to see who was killing bees. I had three or four MORE get stuck in my hair. Those I did manage to shake out without getting stung, at which point I gave up and retreated to the house to wait for the rest of the folks to come back down.

Ultimately, they decided to leave the hive as it was, and let it be a "seed" hive for swarms instead of attempting to harvest honey from it any more, so after they put it back together, we sat for the last part of the class. I came away with a kit for a Warre hive from Nick Hampshire of The Bee Space, which I will be assembling myself sometime this week. (One project my husband doesn't have to do!) Now if I can just get some swarm to cooperate and come live with me!