Natural Beekeeping Practices & Goals

Natural Beekeeping practices and goals

Honey bees have been living naturally without human intervention for millions of years. Even in the last few thousand years since humans have started keeping bees, their existence was mostly natural. It is only in the last hundred years or so, once humans started raising queens artificially, that bees have been slowly cut off from their own evolution.

We believe in the ability of the bees to revert back to a natural existence- if only we let them raise their own queens instead of swapping their genetics on a yearly basis in the process of re-queening.

Ever since I started beekeeping in NZ in 2008, I was always trying to practice bee-centred beekeeping practices that put the bee’s wellness as a top priority. As time went by, I learned more about natural beekeeping and started to implement more and more of the natural beekeeping practices to my system, with the aim to implement as many of the natural beekeeping objectives as possible in my region while still maintaining a sustainable business model. It is an ongoing journey and some of the implements involve a lot of trial and error in order to figure out the best methods.

It was important for me to realize how different regions are very different in beekeeping practices. Some things that suit one region will not suit another, and the information available regarding natural beekeeping is not always straight forward in its implementation. Especially when it comes from different continents in different parts of the world.

We try to follow the bellow natural beekeeping objectives:

• Natural hive reproduction – retaining hive genetics, every hive can produce a daughter hive with a queen of their choosing, using their own unique genetic material.
• Leaving honey for the bees – when harvesting honey, we make sure there is enough honey for the bees to sustain themselves over winter, with minimum supplement of sugar syrup.
• Having permanent and small hive sites – we establish our apiaries in places they can stay year-round. It is not natural for bees to be moved around to different location.
• Keeping bees with minimal interventions – naturally bees live in a closed dark environment, we try to bring opening hives to the minimum necessary
• Chemical free Varroa control – find a combination of organic mite treatments that are not too harsh on the bees and yet help control Varroa distractor mites.
• Natural comb size – allow the bees to dictate the cell size instead of dictating it to them by using foundation wax sheets.

 

 

Natural hive reproduction

While re-queening is the prevailing system in most beekeeping operations, it neglects the fact that every hive that is re-queened also go through a genetic swap. Its genetics is being disposed and replaced. For more information, refer to my articles leaving bee genetics for the bees to manage and A different outlook on re-queening. Over the last 100 years the honey bees had been cut off from their own evolution by the wide spread practice of re-queening

Our philosophy is that every hive is an individual, and as such has the right to reproduce and make its next generation – a daughter hive. Only this way the bees will be able to reconnect with their own evolution and will end up localized, resilient to pests and diseases and better coping with the changing environment that comes with extreme weather events. The name of our business Freebees Honey reflect our feeling of liberating the bees from this strangling practice of re-queening. Our bees are free in the sense that they can continue to live from generation to generation. Like bees in nature, the genetic line of every good hive can be traced back all the way to the first queen that was there when I took over the operation in 2016, and will go on for many more generation, hopefully forever. Not many beekeepers can claim that.

We leave genetics for the bees to manage, we manage the rest.

You can find practical information about how we manage hive genetics in the retaining hive genetics page.

 

Leaving honey for the bees

Bees are amazing creatures! They can, quite naturally, make surplus honey, that is, much more than what they need for themselves. All in all, it can be a fair deal for both bees and beekeepers. The beekeeper gives them a good home to live in, makes sure they have enough food to thrive, and that they are free from pests and diseases. The bees, in return, provide the beekeeper with their surplus honey and pollinate the plants in their area.

It takes a strong hive with a big bee number to create surplus honey, and the art of beekeeping centres mostly around arriving at the time of honey flow with very strong hives.

 By harvesting honey early in the season before honey flow finished and by never taking any honey from the brood boxes, we make sure the bees can collect enough honey to last them over winter.

Unlike many commercial beekeeping operations who will take all the honey of the hive and feed sugar instead, we do our very best to minimise the use of sugar syrup. I can’t say we never feed any sugar syrup to our bees as unpredicted bad weather together with other circumstances can result in shortage of feed for winter for the odd hives. In these cases, we will top up the hive’s storage. When we do use sugar syrup, we add minerals and camomile essences as per the Bio-Dynamic recommendations, to try and make the syrup as much closer to flower nectar as we possibly can.

Our honey is harvested around February using escape boards, which is the most humane way to remove honey from the hives, then extracted in our extracting facility which spins the honey out of the frames whilst keeping the honey natural and raw. The honey is never heated or treated in any way, so when you buy our honey you can rest a sure to get the best quality nutritious honey.

 

Having permanent hive sites

In Nature bees are leaving in a permanent hive. When they issue a swarm, it will find a new home somewhere in a few kilometres’ radius from the original hive. Even then, the original hive will keep on living once a new queen, the daughter of the old queen, has been mated. Bees become very localised in their environment. They know the micro-climate, the different food sources and the local threats of pests and diseases.

The practice of migrating hives for commercial purposes disrupts this local knowledge and create an unnatural confusion.

We do not believe in shifting hives, and all of our hive sites are permanent year-round. Our criteria for a site include the fact that the hives can stay and thrive there permanently.

We do not over-populate our hive sites for the same reason. We keep our hive site small with 10 to 18 hives on each site. By keeping a sustainable hive number on sites, we can make sure there are enough resources for all our hives to thrive throughout the seasons.

 

Keeping bees with minimal interventions

A beehive naturally is a closed and dark environment. All the hive activities are done in the dark. The different smells, including all its pheromones, the different sound they make, all play an integral part in a healthy hive life. Bees have senses we cannot comprehend, not even remotely.

Every time we open a hive, we know we disrupt this closed environment. Therefore, we aim to minimise the amount of time we open our hives per season. Brood inspection twice a year is mandatory for the elimination of the American Foulbrood (AFB) disease in New Zealand and we are happy to comply with that. Then will be the inspection of hives once they finished raising new queens, to see that it mated properly and laying healthy brood. But mostly we can judge if a hive is happy and healthy just by looking on it from the outside or by only removing the lead and having a look from the top.

We believe in “no gloves” approach. When working with bees without gloves, one has to be extra gentle and diligent in order not to upset the bees for the obvious reason that once they get upset, they sting. It’s not that we don’t have gloves in the truck and will use them when the bees get stingy, but mostly our bees are gentle and do not sting.

 

Chemical free Varroa control

Varroa Distractor is the number one hive killer in New Zealand and the rest of the world. Research has shown that without treatment over 90% of the hives will die in order to naturally achieve resistance. Even that number is a rough estimate as the researches were done in areas where bees are endemic or in the US where the Africanized gene had penetrated to mingle with the European honey bee. In New Zealand I am afraid the mortality will be even higher.

As a beekeeper I can’t see even one hive die of varroa. It is a miserable death. I believe treating for varroa while letting the bees develop resistance is the right way forward. Every year I will let all the hives that can handle varroa produce their own new queens. but hives that collapse from varroa while their neighbours are not, (only about 15% of my hives), will get a new queen from one of the good hives. This way over the years I believe I can help the bees develop resistance naturally.

I wish I could say we do not use chemical strips in our hives... it will not be long before we can say that, as we are trialling different combinations of organic treatments and hoping to find the right management plan to go fully organic.

It is not a simple matter. Some of the organic Varroa treatments are very harsh and disruptive on the bees. It is hard to judge what is worse, a chemical treatment that show no sign of harming the bees, or an organic treatment that is very obviously disturbing the bees. Saying that, we are adamant to find an organic combination of treatments to replace the chemical strips.

Another problem is that some of the new organic treatments, mainly the new Oxalic/Glycerine strips are consisting on having quite a big quantity of oxalic acid in the hive almost all the time year-round, and I find it hard to practice something like that, without knowing if there is a long-term effects of oxalic acid on the bees.

We are experimenting different Organic treatments at the moment and hoping to come up with a formula of combinations of the different treatments at different times of the year. We hope that by 2024 we can be 100% chemical free. In the meantime, one third of our hives are chemical free as they are our experimental hives.

We take extra care to make sure there is absolutely no residues of the chemical strips in our honey. In Spring we time the treatments so the strips will come out way ahead of the honey flow. And in autumn, we only apply strips only after all the honey had been take off. On top of that we test our honey for residue with the results of zero residues.

 

Natural comb size

In nature bees build the honey comb in their wild hives, and of course the cell size is dictated by the bees. In most commercial operation a new comb will be started on pre made frames that are then wires and a foundation sheet of beeswax will be embedded on the wire. Once honey flow had started, the bees will draw comb out of the foundation and will store honey in them. The result is a frame that is rigid and does not break when the honey is spun off. Once the honey is spun off, the frames are ready to be used as replacement of old brood frame. This system works well and new frames can be made yearly, and a rotation of new frames can be constant.

The main problem with this system is that the foundation beeswax sheets are pressed with the hexagonal pattern, which mean the bees will draw comb in size that is already dictated by the manufacture, so the bees cannot dictate themselves the exact natural size of the cells.

To work with natural comb size, demand a whole new approach to old frames replacement in the brood nest. We will still need to use removeable frames, as it is required for hive inspection. We could use the same frames but instead of a foundation sheet, we could try use only a strip of wax that is then drawn down and out naturally. This will mean that the frames will not suitable for extraction, as the wax might break when spinning the honey off, especially with thick honey like Manuka or Kanuka.

We are exploring ways we can shift to natural comb in our operation. Again, more research and experiments are required, but we are definitely on the right track.

Working with natural comb size can tie up nicely with a shift to organic, as part of the procedure of converting to organic, is replacing the beeswax in the hive over time to organic beeswax. Once we figure the way to manage Varroa without chemical strips, and figure out a practical way we can work with natural comb, we can start converting to organic.