Author: beardall2013

The colony we rescued was quite small-probably a secondary swarm. Its queen will be very young. The old queen would have led an earlier much larger swarm.

The negative is that the colony might need a bit of help to build up enough to survive the winter. So I needed to feed it. In conventional beekeeping it is usual to feed with sugar syrup but the best food for bees is honey which is preferred in natural beekeeping.

My very strong and healthy WBC colony was in need of more space and more work to do, so I decided that I would use it to produce some food for the warre.

With some scraps of mdf we reduced the internal measurements of a WBC box to take 8 warre frames and put this on the top of the WBC hive.

By the end of July we were able to harvest these beautifully filled and capped warre frames from the WBC.

We put these on top of the existing warre box .

What we know now that we didn’t at the time is that we were due to get some quite severe weather which has severely curtailed the ability of this small colony to forage for itself.

When trying to keep bees naturally it is considered best to use local bees rather than bees from abroad or even other areas of the UK. I was convinced that my extremely strong and healthy WBC hive would swarm so that I could house it in my new warre hive. No such luck. May, June and the beginning of July went by. The WBC colony continued to grow and store large amounts of honey without swarming.

We cut the combs from the arch and placed them into the box. Once the queen was in, the bees were quite happy. We waited until 9pm for returning bees to fly in, replaced the roof and brought it home in the car.

The warré hive is much smaller than conventional hives. The internal measurements of approximately 30cm square is comparable to that of a hollow tree that bees would choose in the wild.

Inside, there are 8 evenly spaced top bars. Instead of sheets of foundation it is usual to fit homemade wax starter strips to these bars to encourage the bees to build their natural naan-shaped combs vertically.

When ordered my new warré I was unable to get a version in cedar so it is in soft wood which needed protection from the weather. I decide that if I had to paint it I would make it distinctive and different.

In the Spring of this year I became aware of the existence of a beehive that might be managed in a more bee friendly way. It was the warre hive, or people’s hive, developed in France by Abbe Warre . He discovered that, contrary to what I had previously assumed , a colony uses less honey to survive the Winter in a single walled hive than in my well insulated WBC simply because the bees are colder and more torpid.

Despite the fact that the frames I already had would be interchangeable with a single walled national hive ,the national wouldn’t overcome my main problem with all conventional hives- the need to frequently open the brood box, stressing the bees and chilling the brood. A warre only needs to be opened once or twice a year, certainly a low intervention system. So, in early May I bought a warre hive.

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