Beekeeping for Poets

Beekeeping for Poets

—or—

Essays on Breakaway Beekeeping in the Postmodern Era,

with Appreciative Regard for the

Hives and Methods of Abbé Émile Warré

By Alexander S. Templeton

Copyright 2012 Alexander S. Templeton

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition License

This ebook is licensed only for your personal use, edification, and enjoyment. This ebook may not be resold, assigned, circulated, hacked, duplicated, or given, with or without consideration. To share this ebook’s content with other persons, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this ebook and did not purchase it, or you did not purchase it for your sole use, then please drop by Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

Thank you for respecting the labor and livelihood of the author.

Table of Contents

Preface

So What Is All This Beekeeping Stuff, Anyhow?

The Progressive Beekeeping Era...

...and Its Discontents

Akin to Evil

Unintended Consequences

A New Path For Beekeeping

Postmodern Natural Beekeeping

The Players in Postmodernism

The Warré Hive: Features and History

Colony Life & The Superorganism

The Needs of Honey Bees

Who Are the Bees?

The Workers

The Queen

The Drones

The Comb

Nectar, Honey, and Pollen

Bee Bread and Bee Milk

Bee Swarming, Sex, and Races

Bee Diseases and Pests

Getting Started in Warré Natural Beekeeping

How to Manage a Warré Hive

Seasonal Hive Service

Warré-Compatible Variations in Hive Management

The Smoker

Bee Repellents

Easy Increase: Swarms and Bait Hives

Honey

Beeswax

Propolis

Stings

Learn More About Beekeeping

Non-Honey Bee Insect Pollinators

Installing Package Bees

Forage

Good Pollen and Nectar Sources

Plant Sources of Propolis

Not So Good: Plants To Avoid

Manmade-Deadly Forage Your Bees May Encounter

Natural Beekeeping Defined—More Or Less

I. Avoid annoying the bees

II. Honor bee biology and behavior

III. Keep bees sustainably

IV. Become partners with the bees

Summary of Demeter Standards

Criticisms of Warré Hives and Management

Warré vs. Framed-Comb Hives: A Closer Look

Beekeeping Annual Schedule

Glossary of Beekeeping Terminology & Jargon

Beyond Warré: Not Perfect… Yet

Reconsidering Some Minor Deities of Rational-Modern Beekeeping

L. L. Langstroth: Father of American Beekeeping

C. C. Miller: The Sage of Marengo

Brother Adam: The XXth Century Beekeeper

On the Shoulders of Giants

Jan Dzierzon

August von Berlepsch

Resources

Old-Media Books and Publications

"... the unscientific reader will find it hard to tell where the observation ends, and the poetic fancy begins…"

—Bee Scientist and Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch

Preface

Beekeeping for Poets is not intended solely for poets, really. It’s more of an attempt to highlight the truth, wisdom, and beauty all around beekeeping, instead of joining the oh-no-not-another-bee-book club of rehashed rules of thumb, orthodox dogma, and lore. One can read authoritative, exhaustive references on contemporary progressive beekeeping, in excruciatingly redundant detail and variety—just… elsewhere.

Beekeepers as a rule are pretty mild-mannered, solitude-seeking, and independent. But there are those who are righteous and opinionated, ever-ready with an ipse dixit attributed to a supposed authority—usually one long-dead. For these personalities, foreign or radical notions are rarely likely to displace those deep-rooted, cherished beliefs that, true to human nature, provide only cozy confirmation of the Truth. This is a pretty narrow, dark path to tread, so why start following it in the first place?

Instead we’ll consider the ingredients of an emerging philosophy of beekeeping that builds upon yet transcends the rationalized approach developed over the past 150 years. Should the author on occasion tender a certain skepticism towards received wisdom, or convey a determined disinterest in many of the persistent tenets of beekeeping orthodoxy—well, take those as a courtesy on the author’s part to help immunize new beekeepers against obsolete methods and thinking, and to ready experienced beeks for the journey of unlearning some of that stuff formerly known as good and proper.

Ultimately the purpose of this book is to present an opportunity to break with the lockstep tyranny of conformist, stagnant, modern-progressive beekeeping. Diversity has generally come to be regarded as an invaluable strategy in devising robust, resilient systems—why not in beekeeping as well?

But happily, and consistent with the book’s title, the author does throw in a little relevant verse now & then, so you won’t feel cheated or disappointed. Why, the first snippet starts just 108 words down…

So herein you’ll get a little of this and a smattering of that, which hopefully will serve the reader well in starting off properly in naturally-oriented beekeeping:

• A brief history of the formerly predominant hive type and beekeeping style;

• Introductions to some key historical players in the evolution of beekeeping;

• Musings on the ways and means of postmodern beekeeping;

• Mention of basic facts and possibly obscure aspects of honey bee biology;

• Resources, resources, and resources: information, tips, hints & kinks; for further inquiry; and for communing with like-minded beekeepers;

• Mention of just enough of the fundamentals for getting started in a natural beekeeping hobby, sideline, or profession that can last a lifetime.

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.— William Butler Yeats, 1888

So What Is All This Beekeeping Stuff, Anyhow?

Beekeeping is the craft, art, and science of maintaining a plurality of bees, presumably for some Man-centric purpose. Of particular interest are honey bees, which comprise the half-dozen insect races of Apis mellifera. Notwithstanding their 25- to 50-million year-old pedigree, honey bees seem remarkably amenable to being stuffed in a box, and to occasionally having their honey and wax filched. It’s the job of the beekeeper to see that the bees be kept healthy, be enabled to do what they do, and so enjoy some beeish semblance of contentment with their lot.

Beekeeping is understood not to be honey-hunting, the craft of tracking wild honey bee foragers back to their nests to the end of raiding their stores; nor is it the now-rare tradition of discovering or carving and maintaining wild honey bee-occupied cavities in living trees. Beekeeping now almost always implies the use of artificial nests called hives to house honey bees.

So why beekeeping? Practically, keeping honey bees is a fascinating and rewarding pastime that can be enjoyed in several ways. See if you can find some resonance with these:

• For the restful and healthful pleasure of working out of doors with stubbornly wild, mildly dangerous creatures;

• For producing a bonus of locally-made honey, beeswax, and other bee products, for sharing with family, friends, neighbors, and shopkeepers; or, for turning a small profit;

• For establishing, restoring, or increasing a population of locally-adapted honey bee races;

• For enhanced pollination of a garden, orchard, or cropland;

• For promotion of beekeeping as a rediscovered rural, suburban, or urban solitary and community enterprise;

• …or because the hives just look cool in the back yard!

Archaeology suggests that organized beekeeping in artificial hives goes back at least 4000 years. Honey bees have been housed successfully in everything from handmade mud or clay pots, to dung-coated, woven straw baskets, to high-tech molded plastic hives with interchangeable parts and endless accessories.

Maybe honey bees mostly don’t give a hoot about where Men put them, but the millennia certainly testify to their adaptability and ability to establish and maintain a community in widely-varying environments. Thus anybody—that means you too—can keep honey bees successfully almost anywhere, with relatively little trouble and low expense.

The Progressive Beekeeping Era…

The era of rational, "Progressive" beekeeping, spanning the years roughly 1851—2001, was dominated by boxy, standardized hives with moveable, interchangeable frames of honey and brood comb, and by intensive, livestock-style methods of colony management. Influential beekeeping figures such as L. L. Langstroth, C. C. Miller, and Brother Adam promoted the use of these novel patent hives, and championed invasive techniques for imposing their style of order upon honey bee colonies to the end of maximizing honey production, increasing colony numbers, and improving the races of bees. Western manufacturing prowess, cheap materials and labor, and aggressive marketing and promotion led to worldwide adoption of standardized hives and rational—if not always exactly scientific—beekeeping methods.

The gold-standard rational hive of the industrialized West throughout the 20th Century, and still hanging on, is called the Langstroth, after its inventor. The "Lang" and its derivatives all feature rigid, moveable-comb frames, spaced just so from the hive’s inner walls. Eight to ten frames in a top-opening box means free and easy access to both brood and honey-storage areas of the colony.

The frames are preferentially primed with foundation: thin, reinforced sheets of beeswax, plastic, or even metal, pre-embossed with a uniform honey comb pattern. In these rational hives, foundation is meant to help the bees build the correct type of comb in an orderly manner.

The salient feature of frames is movability of the brood and honey comb, supposed to allow inspection, dissection, and manipulation of every part of the hive at any time, for any reason. Frames allow mix-and-match comb transfer within and between hives, promote artificial forms of colony increase, and facilitate the uncap-extract-reuse model of honey comb management. For economy, efficiency, and peak honey production, framed honey comb is intended to be emptied and reused many times, with specialized equipment and technique dedicated to this end.

…and Its Discontents

However, mastering progressive beekeeping with the framed-comb hive has its downsides. It is somewhat complicated to manage, with many rigid protocols to adhere to and branch-points to take week-to-week and month-to-month. It uses several dissimilar hive box types, with much expense and labor of assembling boxes, and endlessly handling frames and foundation.

Mostly however it demands constant checking of hive status and performing interventions: decisions over movement and placement of honey storage and brood comb; locating, killing and replacing the queen; and monitoring for disease. These are the never-ending concerns of this style of beekeeping.

Akin to Evil:

The Unwitting Destruction of Honey Bee Genetic Diversity

In progressive-industrial beekeeping, natural bee sex and reproduction (swarming) of honey bee colonies have largely been displaced by widespread practices which threaten to lead to an irreversible loss of wild-bred diversity and regional adaptation in the races of Apis mellifera:

• Historic importation of relatively few races of the honey bee into geographical regions; this set the stage for widespread pandemic-scale mass-vulnerability to the tracheal mite (Acarapis woodii) and the Varroa mite (Varroa destructor), and to various microbe-associated diseases.

• Battery rearing of queens of ever-fewer bloodlines, sometimes artificially inseminated with a single drone’s sperm; these serve to further increase the susceptibility to mass parasitism and disease;

• Selective queen breeding with Mendelian methods to reinforce the dubiously reinforceable traits of Fecundity… Industry…Resistance to Disease…[and] Disinclination to Swarm (Brother Adam), and generally, gentleness, hygienic behavior, and increased honey production;

• Shipment of mass-reared queens between different bioregions; this constantly reintroduces bloodlines that are generally ill-adapted to local conditions and microclimates;

• Genetic engineering of the honey bee herself—as if this has worked so well in other areas of DNA tinkering.

Boring but important: genetically-uniform honey bee colonies have gut flora featuring fewer beneficial-symbiotic microbes and more pathogenic ones, setting the stage for disease and debility. Conversely, genetically-diverse colonies (where the queen has mated with many drones) have a broader beneficial active microbial base for bee bread production and as gut symbionts that aid digestion.

Unintended Consequences

It is generally acknowledged, and indeed ballyhooed long and loud, that the framed hives and intensive beekeeping techniques of the 19th and 20th centuries facilitated manifold increases in honey production compared to former and now-marginalized hives and beekeeping methods.

Less obvious but more important in terms of beekeeping revenue are the methodical culturing and manipulation of honey bee colonies as a livestock-modeled, mass-produced commodity for industrial-scale, managed pollinator-based, pesticide-dependent agriculture.

The overlooked downsides to all this progress include:

• Global interspecies transfer and spread of bee diseases and parasites, leading to widespread honey bee die-offs;

• Unquestioned reliance on feedings of globally-produced,