Les Crowder - Top-Bar Beekeeping: Organic Practices for Honeybee Health

Praise for Top-Bar Beekeeping

This is an excellent guide for hobby beekeepers who wish to keep bees using top-bar hives. Drawing on his more than thirty years of beekeeping experience in New Mexico, author Les Crowder describes in detail the special comb-management techniques that this low-cost, but relatively intensive, form of beekeeping requires. Top-Bar Beekeeping also provides an eloquent appeal for beekeepers to make care, respect, and reverence the foundation of their relationships with the bees.

Thomas D. Seeley, Cornell University;
author of Honeybee Democracy and The Wisdom of the Hive

Reading Top-Bar Beekeeping reminds me of the classes I took with Les Crowder several years ago. Hes a man who truly knows whereof he speaks, who has the gift of communicating with his small friends, the bees, and sharing his understanding with
us.... This is the one book on beekeeping that I will recommend to my permaculture students.

Scott Pittman, director, Permaculture Institute USA

All rights reserved.

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs copyright 2012 by John T. Denne.

Unless otherwise noted, all illustrations copyright 2012 by Jeff Spicer.

No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Project Manager: Patricia Stone

Developmental Editor: Ben Watson

Copy Editor: Ellen Brownstein

Proofreader: Alice Colwell

Indexer: Shana Milkie

Designer: Melissa Jacobson

Printed in the United States of America

First printing August, 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 12 13 14 15 16

Our Commitment to Green Publishing

Chelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book manufacturing practices with our editorial mission and to reduce the impact of our business enterprise in the environment. We print our books and catalogs on chlorine-free recycled paper, using vegetable-based inks whenever possible. This book may cost slightly more because it was printed on paper that contains recycled fiber, and we hope youll agree that its worth it. Chelsea Green is a member of the Green Press Initiative ( www.greenpressinitiative.org ), a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the worlds endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Top-Bar Beekeeping was printed on FSC-certified paper supplied by CJK that contains at least 10% post-consumer recycled fiber.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Crowder, Les.

Top-bar beekeeping : organic practices for honeybee health / Les Crowder and Heather Harrell.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-60358-461-6 (pbk.) ISBN 978-1-60358-462-3 (ebook)

1. Bee culture. 2. Beehives. 3. Honeybee. I. Harrell, Heather. II. Title.

SF523.C858 2012

638'.1dc23

2012020426

Chelsea Green Publishing

85 North Main Street, Suite 120

White River Junction, VT 05001

(802) 295-6300

www.chelseagreen.com

The ideas and methods detailed in this book have evolved over the course of nearly forty years. Many of the events and experiments took place when I was working with bees on my own. I had been long encouraged to write a book to share these experiences, but writing does not come easily to me. My wife, Heather, is a wonderful writer and has taken the stories from my past, which are written in the first-person singular I, and the experiences we have had keeping bees together, which are written in the first-person plural we, throughout the majority of the text. This explains why the narrative voice changes from time to time throughout the text from I to we.

It is with tremendous gratitude that we want to thank all of the students, friends, and loving family who helped us to make this book a reality. It was through the support of generous organizations such as the McCune Foundation, the Santa Fe Community Foundation, Prosperity Works, Cuatro Puertas, and the New Mexico Department of Agriculture that we were able to see this project through to its completion. We also thank the Western Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education (SARE) organization for helping us to turn our farm into a demonstration site for pollinator forage species, providing us with the means to give something back to life.

And, most importantly, we must thank the bees. They are our best teachers, and for their willingness to tolerate us as their keepers and share with us their bounty, we are endlessly grateful. This book is for them.

I can remember my young fingers holding a tadpole,

caressing the slime skin with a probing awareness

of life. There was an art

to the preservation, a deep inquiry

through the tunnels of the body

to know as is and not as would be broken.

I remember a wasp on fingertip only with fear

would sting, and the snapping turtles

who stole away toes in the myths

of street children, peering at me with wizened

faces from beneath backs hardened

to the penetration of sun.

I remember a baby bird lost

from its mothers nest, flailing in fallen

leaves, in the hardest conjunction

before independence. We placed it

in a shoebox with a pillowcase and a worm and it died

there before seeing its first dawn of world

or discovering the weight of wings.

I remember ants by the millions

in villages every few feet. They carried

in dutiful progression, the summer into fall.

I watched the tiny pieces of this lifted

parade without the slightest

consideration of what might be

their rightful due in accolade.

But then everything was a prayer,

unconscious and subliminal, like dreams

on liquid space. Id perch in time, resting

my chin on a palm of salient inquiry, with a childs

full understanding of everything as is. God

was not a word then but genesis was everywhere,

called to me by leaf and brook and breezes

scented by decay.

From these memories I know that life

is truly wondrous and what dies

is what gives birth and to death

I am grateful, as to life

I am living, and one without the other

seems to me our worlds very worst

miss of giving.