The Five Hour Beekeeper

The Five Hour Beekeeper

Traditional Approach To Beekeeping

To date I have basically been following what I shall call the “traditional approach to beekeeping”.  This is detailed in My Beekeeping Calendar and involves a lot of activity and time.  It can be summarised as:

  1. Inspections every 9 days from May-August to reduce swarms
  2. Integrated approach to varroa management, including swarm culling and use of chemicals
  3. Production of liquid honey requiring a day of extraction
July 2015 - Middle Hive - Brood Frame
July 2015 – Middle Hive – Brood Frame

I have found myself too busy to do any of this particularly well resulting in what I call the “Low Intervention Approach”.

Low Intervention Approach To Beekeeping

  1. No swarm inspections – just catch the swarms as they happen.  This has been 80% successful (I caught 4 out of 5 swarms in 2016).
  2. Same integrated approach to varroa management as previous
  3. Move towards section honey
Eight Ross Rounds Sections (the 2016 haul)
Eight Ross Rounds Sections (the 2016 haul)

The Five Hour Beekeeper

In my desire to reduce the chemicals, reduce the effort further and spend more time observing the bees, my approach for 2017 is described below.  This has been massively helped by the Thermosolar Hive team providing me with two of their hives.  As a reminder, this hive allows increases in the temperature in the hive to kill 100% of varroa. (links below)

Thermosolar Hive - Ceiling & Sensors
Thermosolar Hive – Ceiling & Sensors

The Thermosolar hives I am receiving will have a 14×12 National brood body (this is where I will insert 4 drone frames), 1 super that I will put below the brood body (to create more worker bees) and two Ross Round supers to go above the brood box.

The approach can be summarised as follows (and their are relevant links at the end of this post):

  1. Anti-swarm approach to reduce swarming
  2. Thermosolar hive to eliminate varroa and improve bee health
  3. 100% section honey using Ross Rounds
  4. Observing the bees to determine if they have a queen, any disease
  5. Open a hive only when I need to

My first year will be a bit different as I move over to the Themosolar hive but generally the interventions will be:

  • Intervention 1: The first day it is 15C in Feb/Mar: inspect for disease, add 2 new drone comb frames to hives and remove mouseguards
  • Interventions 2 and 3 (optional if we get an early 20C day in the year): Complete a solar treatment and again a week later.  Note: the important solar treatment is in August.
  • Intervention 4: April: Add Two Ross Round Supers
  • Intervention 5: End July: Remove Ross Round Supers and remove drone comb to ends of hive
  • Interventions 6 and 7: August: Complete a solar treatment and again a week later
  • Intervention 8: September: Feed if required (I am aiming to not have to do this by removing supers early and having healthy bees)
  • Intervention 9: October/November: Add mouseguards

And generally observe the bees and take action if problems are evident.

In theory, each hive will take about 5 hours of effort per year, including harvesting, and allow more time to observe.  Let’s see what happens in practice.

Any thoughts at this stage to make my 2017 beekeeping, using the above approach, more likely to be successful?

Postscript

I have received comments on beekeeping forum and I wanted to capture my further thoughts and actions:

1. Thermosolar Hive – I am going to contact my local government bee inspector, to see if they want to get involved in order to work out how to best test the thermosolar hive and to give independent results.  I want results to show impact on varroa and on the brood (and on drone sperm if possible).

2. Anti-swarm method – I’ll keep count of the swarms over the years using this method.  Results will somewhat speak for themselves, though it will also depend on how well I time insertion of drone comb, weather conditions, etc.

3. Ross Rounds – Richard Taylor (author) had a few approaches to developing section honey, two of these were about using shook swarms and regular swarms and one of them was about swarm management and taking the approach we generally take to make regular supers of honey.  I am going for the low intervention, latter, approach.  However, if I do catch any swarms (mine or someone else’s) I will be putting them into a super with QE above and flat comb throughout.  The results will speak for themselves (kind of, as my honey production has not been great yet in recent years)

More Information:

The Barefoot Beekeeper

I’m a sucker for old ways of doing things, new ways of doing things, different ways of doing things, so I was always going to have a soft spot for a book like this.  And despite advocating natural beekeeping methods, there was no mention of feeding honeybees chamomile tea.

So what did I make of this book?

The Synopsis

Philip is very concerned about the traditional Langstroth hive, conventional beekeeping methods and the use of pesticides.  He’s made me concerned too!

Philip is an advocate of the Top Bar Hive (TBH).  The key reasons for this, is that he believes, the thicker material makes them easier for honeybees to maintain their colony temperature and he likes bees to make their own wax foundation to their natural specifications.  He also believes they are more ergonomic due to their height and they are cheaper and require less equipment than the Langstroth. He uses a horizontal TBH (hTBH) as opposed to a vertical TBH, which is the Warre Hive.  I’m learning!

Philip is an advocate of “natural beekeeping” which means lower, but adequate, intervention, not smoking the hive and not doing things like clipping queens.  It also means taking less honey and spending more time observing the bees.

I also understand that barefoot beekeeping allows for the use of swarm management techniques and feeding the bees when they need it.  It also allows the use of sprinkling them with icing sugar and use of oxalic acid (if needed).  But hopefully, if you get the rest right, the bees will be in better health to look after themselves and hence less intervention is required.

More research is needed into the health of honeybees and how conventional methods might be having a negative impact, and hence the book is based on a mix of ideas and facts.

One of the authors’ objectives is to challenge the conventional approach to beekeeping.  This is a big task.  From a personal experience, all the courses and books and most of the beekeepers I have so far been exposed to are the conventional type.  (Conventional in terms of beekeeping, unconventional in terms of personality).  I had taken it as fact that I needed to smoke my bees and use wax foundation.  Who was I to challenge this?

The author can consider himself successful in his impact on my thinking and behaviour:

  1. He has made me curious about natural beekeeping
  2. I am going to experiment with doing a few things differently with my Nationals immediately
  3. A TBH would be an interesting addition to my hive-mix and I will consider buying one
  4. I am going to further research any scientific papers available to help me make decisions based on evidence

I have already done some reading and am in the process of writing a post titled “Evidence-Based Beekeeping”.  If you would like to be one of the first to receive this post, please follow this blog (top right of page).

Will I Use A Top Bar Hive?

Making a TBH as cheaply as possible seems to be an important part of the initiation into being a barefoot beekeeper, though the author does talk about using champagne corks from his cellar to plug entrances as required.  Corks from our wedding have long gone and I don’t have the tools, skills or innate ability to take a hive plan, some bit of wood and make a hive.

But Yes, I will definitely consider buying one.  I love wild comb and I believe in focusing on bee health as a way to creating honey.  The only thing putting me off is that others have said they have tried to use one with limited success.  So before taking this step I will investigate more and also I need to think about where I can put more hives.

Read the Dave Loveless review of the Top Bar Hive for more information.

Will I Be A Barefoot Beekeeper?

In writing this blog and researching hive types, I had started to pick-up on this fringe of natural beekeepers so some of the ideas had already started to infiltrate my psyche.  These included:

  • I wanted to focus on the health of my bees as a route to honey production
  • I located my hives in the countryside with plenty of flower and plant diversity, no rape in sight and fields devoted to live stock rather than crop (hence less pesticide I think)
  • I had bought a 14×12 brood box as I felt this would give the bees more space for brood and to store their own honey for winter
  • I was also planning on insulating the hive in winter so they used less honey during this period
  • I had considered a beehaus for their insulation properties and ergonomic height (though natural beekeepers will shudder at the use of plastic)
  • I already had no intention of clipping Queens (though this might have been more to do with my fears than for natural beekeeping reasons)
  • I wanted to have fewer and faster inspections than advocated in many books as there is a direct impact on honey production
  • At every chance I speak to fellow allotmenters about the bees and explain swarming so as to reduce anxieties

As a direct result of reading this book I am going to try the following:

  • Not using smoke or anything else when I inspect the hive
  • With future National hives experiment with using wax starter strips in the brood box to at least give the bees some chance of creating the cell sizes they want

I will let you know how it goes! I might discover for myself why people use smoke and wax foundation!  Any thoughts before I embark on this experiment?

Reminder of some useful links

If you want to buy The Barefoot Beekeeper, or other natural beekeeping books, please click here.

As I have said elsewhere, whilst building your own TBH is to be encouraged (it’s part of the initiation process), if you are like me, this is not an option. These links below might be helpful.  A particiapant in a beekeeping forum says “don’t faff about with a 3′ hive, go for 4′ “.

3’ TBH with viewing window

4’ TBH with viewing window

(US Link)

Reading this book led me to Evidence-Based Beekeeping.  Note: evidence gathering is still in progress!