Permaculture Beekeeping

Jacqueline Freeman, from her lesson from the online permaculture design course, talks about preservation beekeeping, or permaculture beekeeping.

She talks about clean and natural beekeeping, and how to support the bees by promoting less intervention and more understanding/observation of their behavior.

Jacqueline emphasizes the need for beekeepers to abandon the use of chemicals, a conventional practice that hampers the bees' natural evolution to deal with pests, predators, and diseases. She shares her belief in creating healthy conditions and providing good food for the bees, allowing them to survive even in challenging circumstances like Varroa mites or Deformed Wing Virus. She encourages aspiring beekeepers to prioritize the bees' needs, reminding us that bees are not just honey producers for humans, but an important part of our natural ecosystem. Lastly, Jacqueline shares her favorite hive and recounts a fascinating story of a bee swarm choosing to make a home in a hollow tree section in her front yard, emphasizing her approach to beekeeping, which is not about maximizing honey production, but about fostering a healthy environment for bees to thrive.

Many hobby beekeepers adopt the same technique.
The video is interesting.

Jacqueline emphasizes the need for beekeepers to abandon the use of chemicals, a conventional practice that hampers the bees' natural evolution to deal with pests, predators, and diseases. She shares her belief in creating healthy conditions and providing good food for the bees, allowing them to survive even in challenging circumstances like Varroa mites or Deformed Wing Virus. She encourages aspiring beekeepers to prioritize the bees' needs, reminding us that bees are not just honey producers for humans, but an important part of our natural ecosystem. Lastly, Jacqueline shares her favorite hive and recounts a fascinating story of a bee swarm choosing to make a home in a hollow tree section in her front yard, emphasizing her approach to beekeeping, which is not about maximizing honey production, but about fostering a healthy environment for bees to thrive.

I started Beekeeping about 5 years ago with a Langstroth Hive, 2 deeps and 4 mediums and a Mentor! The first year the bees froze from the condensation dripping down and refreezing according to my mentor. At the end of the next year I KNEW that I needed a different way of keeping bees as I was in my late 70's and those 60 to 80 pound supers being lifted from above shoulder level up and around was just too much and I wasn't getting any younger.

I started looking on the internet and found this site,  horizontalhive.com which intrigued me enough to really take a close look at those horizontal hives with large Layens Frames. I bought the book, "Keeping Bees With A Smile" and read it through. I never looked back after that. That site had info on a 2 day seminar in Missouri and I decided to attend that.

The seminar was awesome! Phd. Leo Sharashkin's presentation was exactly along the lines of Jacqueline Freeman's ideas of don't medicate your bees, let them live naturally. This was a classroom seminar the first day and out around the beehives the 2nd day. What amazed me was having 50 people standing around various hives with Dr. Leo explaining his methods and taking all kinds of questions. Only one person got stung ONE time ant that was Dr. Leo on the hand. All of their hives seemed to have very calm bees. AND, I came back with a Horizontal Hive.

These hives make a world of difference on both bees and humans. The bees have a large area for the growth of their colony - and in my case without the use of chemicals. They do get fed some sugar water in early Spring, but even the bees seem to know when to quit that and go for the real Nectar. For the humans - this humane way of raising bees eliminates the need to constantly open the hive for "inspections", eliminates the need for costly chemicals, and allows the bees, although being kept in artificial environments, to live their lives much as if they were in the wild. These hives also eliminate the very heavy lifting as full frames are around 8 to 10 pounds each. When the hive is opened the frames' top bars are all touching therefore not disturbing the bees as in a Langstroth Hive when it is opened.

Want to check on the Queen? In a Langstroth Hive you lift all of the supers off down to the bottom Deep Box and then pull frames trying to find her. In a Horizontal Hive you lift the cover and ALL Frames are exposed. Usually the Queen will be in one of the first two frames on an end of the hive.

Ten frames or more full of honey are left for overwintering the bees during the early part of Winter. After that, usually the full frames will last them through to early Spring's warmer weather. The structure of these horizontal hives are 2" X 2" framing with two walls of 1/2" or 5/8" plywood. The cavities are filled with around 7 pounds of sheep's wool before the second layer of siding is installed. This helps keep the bees much warmer than the Langstroth's 3/4" single wood siding. It also helps to reduce the temperatures of very hot summer days as well.

Some of the beekeepers around our local area are starting to convert to horizontal hives (HH) by using their Langstroth Frames in a HH built to accommodate those frames, mostly for all of the benefits as shown above. In fact you can get FREE Plans to make such hives from the same web site that I noted,  horizontalhive.com - and you can obtain FREE Plans for the HH that accept the large formatted Layens Frames from the same source. Go to the site and click on Plans on the Main Menu.

Check out the possibility of a HH or a modified HH with Langstroth equipment. You might like what you see. And, if you see that another 2 day seminar is being held - and you can afford it - I would say to "Go see and learn" what keeping bees with a smile is all about!

Thanks Jesse, we dont get the cold weather you speak of, so the traditional hive works for us.
Its good to see the variations to suit the circumstances.

John C Daley wrote:Thanks Jesse, we dont get the cold weather you speak of, so the traditional hive works for us.
Its good to see the variations to suit the circumstances.

It was all about the heavy lifting for me. Shoulder height and lifting 60 - 80 lbs was getting to be too much in my late 70's.
Now both I and the bees are much calmer too.