Bees are fascinating creatures with complex behaviours some of which we still don't understand. In order to keep honey bees the best way possible we need to try to understand how and why bees behave the way they do, and endeavour to allow bees to live as nature intended with minimum interference - after all bees have been around for a few more million years than we have... Take a look at the sections below for information on the honey bee and natural bee keeping, and an introduction to the other 249 species of bee we have in the UK
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Hello!
This wont be a regular diary kind of thing of bee inspections etc mainly because as a natural bee keeper I try to keep my interfernce with the hives to a minimum but also because I'm just not that organised!
Anywoo..
My background in bee keeping is thus - I completed a BBKA bee keeping course in 2009 at Heaton Park, Manchester. They were a lovely group of people but I have to admit that the course put me totally off bee keeping! It seemed to concentrate on what could go wrong and how often we 'must' intervene to treat or manipulate the hive. No thanks I thought far too much work for me!
But then in 2012 a colleague wanted to get bee hives for a community allotment that the charity I worked for managed. OK I said but you're looking after them.. A year later he left the company and we had 3 hives to do something with. So 6 years later here I am!
I think the difference was that subsequently after taking over the hives I attended a natural bee keeping course run by Philip Chandler at Brinscall Hall, Chorley. This course concentrated on the bee, trying to understand their behaviour and therefore doing our best to just let them get on with it and only intervening when necessary e.g. disease or starvation.
I then did lots of reading on the honey bee and you begin to realise just how amazing they are and how little we know about them. I throughly reccommend 'The Buzz About Bees' by Jurgen Tautz.
So what follows will be interesting (hopefully) write ups of bad, good and weird experiences I have with the bees. Please contact me with any comments or other observations you'd like to share
