Over more than 30 years of keeping bees I have had my share of triumphs and disasters. My mentor in the early 80s was an elderly man in our local village whose methods even then were old fashioned. I now realise that he would have been a novice beekeeper not long after Edwardian Times. He used better insulated WBC hives instead of the cheaper and more modern national. He didn’t wear gloves, rear queens or treat his hives with chemicals. He used a goose quill as a bee brush because it was kinder to the bees.
When he died I was on my own. I resisted joining beekeeping clubs, preferring bee-centred husbandry to the highly interventionist management encouraged by such associations.
My successes have included the times when stray swarms have chosen empty hives in my apiary to adopt as their homes. My failures have mostly been losing a few colonies to cold, damp Yorkshire winters.
Whether my low intervention approach has contributed to these losses is difficult to tell but I can say for certain that only one colony may have been weakened by varroa before its demise. My instinct and experience tell me that what is good for the bees in the wild is good for the bees in the hive ie no chemicals, no plastic, no artificial swarm management, no routine inspections and no artificial feeding. Hence “The Unkept Hive”.
“Let us now….leave the science others have acquired, and look at the bees with our own eyes.”
“The Life of the Bee ” by Maeter-linck
The Unkept Hive 