Dear friends

What is natural beekeeping?

Natural beekeeping is all about enabling bee colonies to live as closely as possible to the way that they would live in nature. This enables them to make use of the systems that they have evolved – over millions of years – to survive and indeed to thrive under changing conditions.

Natural beekeeping is NOT primarily about what type of hive you choose to house the bees. Whatever style of hive you choose, you can practise beekeeping that enables bees to live as naturally as possible. For example, on pages 3 to 4, read more of Dr Wolfgang Ritter’s article on good management practise – here he describes how the self-healing capacity of a honey bee colony (and he is describing frame hive beekeeping) can be utilised for achieving good bee health.

BfD’s general principles of natural beekeeping describe an approach, and are not a prescriptive list of instructions to be followed:

• Treat the bee colony as a complete organism

• Respect the natural processes of the bees

• Be aware that retention of the bees’ scent and heat within their nest is crucial

• Minimise intrusion into the colony

• Allow bees to build their own comb - with cell size of their own choosing

• Allow the bees’ own reproduction impulse to determine swarming

• Leave colonies with enough of their own honey to survive winter or other dearth periods

• Work with bees that are of local origin and thus have adapted to local prevailing conditions

• Ensure that the density of bees colonies is appropriate to local forage conditions

Regular observation at the entrance to a hive enables the beekeeper to understand and recognise the health and development of the colony, so that your management intervention is informed by appreciation of the bees’ own needs. Minimise your intervention, and follow these three broad principles:

• Do not put anything into the hive which did not come from the bees

• Do not take anything out of the hive which the bees cannot afford to lose

• Be guided by the bees.

To be guided by bees, you need to be familiar with their behaviour and needs: this is something that you can learn from observation of bees, and by talking to experienced beekeepers.