Kim Flottum - Common Sense Natural Beekeeping: Sustainable, Bee-Friendly Techniques to Help Your Hives Survive and Thrive

COMMON SENSE
Natural Beekeeping

SUSTAINABLE, BEE-FRIENDLY TECHNIQUES TO HELP YOUR HIVES SURVIVE AND THRIVE

KIM FLOTTUM

with Stephanie Bruneau

There is a saying in beekeeping that if you ask ten beekeepers a question, youll receive eleven answers. Beekeepers are a notoriously opinionated bunch, and there are a lot of ways to conduct the ancient craft of keeping bees! But what if, instead of asking the beekeepers for guidance and advice, we asked the bees themselves?

Honey bees have existed for millions of years, evolving natural systems that benefit their ability to survive and thrive. By looking to bees for the answers to our beekeeping questions, we tap into this evolutionary legacy. In Common Sense Natural Beekeeping, we suggest a method of beekeeping based on deep respect for and understanding of the honey bee colony as a highly evolved system.

Conventional beekeeping treats bees as livestock, prioritizing the desires and needs of humans, such as honey yields and agricultural crops, over the health of the pollinators and the planet. But this approach is backfiring. As we write this book in 2021, honey bees in many parts of the world struggle to remain healthy. In the United States, 43.7 percent of managed bee colonies were lost between April 2019 to April 2020the second-highest rate of loss since beekeepers began reporting and recording yearly colony losses in 2006. Bee pests and the diseases they carry, the use of toxic agricultural chemicals on the crops that bees pollinate, the prevalence of monoculture practices in agriculture, and beekeeper practices themselves are challenging the bees in unprecedented ways.

As beekeepers, how do we respond to these increasing threats to managed honey bee survival? Do we accept this rate of yearly colony collapse and simply import replacement bees from other regions to keep replenishing hive losses? Do we fight the pests and diseases with a battery of chemical treatments that may harm our bees (and the environment) in other ways? Do we throw up our hands and surrender?

Even as managed colonies struggle and require ever more intervention just to pull through, wild honey bee colonies are not just surviving, theyre thrivingwithout any intervention. This has encouraged some beekeepers to advocate returning to a more natural approach to beekeeping, where bees are not managed but left to their own devices, as they are in nature. Natural beekeeping, though, is an oxymoron: In the strictest sense, being natural means not being kept. Simply having bees in your backyard, a place chosen by you, begins to erode the concept. Anything a beekeeper does, with or for a colony of honey bees, chips away at the all-natural ideal. And what about our agricultural system? We will continue to rely on managed bee colonies to support our current food system unless we make major changes in our land use policies and agricultural methods.

Our choices, when we decide to have bees in our lives, range from absolute controlwhere they live, what they eat, medicating against and treating disease and parasites, protecting them from predatorsto only observing bees in a natural hive of their choosing, such as a tree cavity, with no interference. But which is the optimum model? Common sense natural beekeeping is the middle ground between micromanagement and no management, and it allows the bees, the environment, and the beekeepers to thrive.

Common sense natural beekeeping presents a more sustainable alternative to both micromanagement and non-management. Firmly based on the biology of honey bees, our philosophy comes from a position of deep respect for these unique and remarkable creatures. By observing the way that bees live in the wild, beekeepers using our methods learn to make management decisions, including hive design, that incorporate the bees innate intelligence and behavior.

Common sense natural beekeeping also advocates aligning our priorities to those of the bee: Everything is done for the good of the whole. Doing so puts the focus on the health and well-being of the bees and the planet, knowing that this is in our best interest, too. After all, as London rooftop beekeeper Ian Davies said in the documentary Queen of the Sun, Theyre keeping us alivenot the other way around!

Each chapter in this book outlines a different question in the practice of beekeeping and then looks to the bees themselves for advice and guidance, leaning heavily on science describing the habits and preferences of honey bees in the wild, where theyve been evolving for millennia. If youve been with bees for a while, you are aware of the basic concept that if what we do is good for the beekeeper, it is almost always bad for the bees. What we do in these pages is explore the best we can do for both bees and beekeepers so that both are able to survive and thrive.

While most of the recommendations of common sense natural beekeeping only make sense for the backyard beekeeper, some are applicable for bee operations of any scale. Our hope is that this book will give you a better understanding of how bees choose to live when theyre left to their own devices and how to make choices that are more in line with that information. With this knowledge, we hope youll create your own common sense management practices that lead to a mutually beneficial relationship with your bees, a relationship that balances your own beekeeping needs and desires with what the bees need to be able to succeed.

In all cases, common sense natural beekeepers are not only bee keepers, but also bee students and bee guardians. We look to the bees for the answers to our beekeeping questions, believing that the bees know how to bee better than we do!

Scientists believe that bees evolved from predatory wasps about 120 million years ago, during the Cretaceous Period. This is around the same time flowering plants began to develop, and the two coevolved at an exponential rate. As plants diversified, so did the bees, many shifting from feeding on a handful of specific plants to becoming generalists. The oldest known bee fossil, preserved in amber, is 100 million years old, which means bees lived beside dinosaurs and survived when the mighty reptiles didnt! The Apis family, to which honey bees belong, didnt evolve until 90 million years ago, and the evidence suggests that honey bees in particular originated in Asia, making their way to Europe and Africa 300,000 years ago.