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Dear friends
For many years now Bees for Development has been promoting the concept of simple, natural beekeeping as practised today in many countries worldwide. In these pages, we have described how honey and beeswax harvested from forest beekeeping meet the world’s highest criteria for these products - because the honey bee populations are healthy and, because beekeepers never treat their bees with medicines, the honey and beeswax are always free from any residues of these medicines - a problem that besets much of the world’s industrialised beekeeping.
The beekeeping techniques used in simple, natural beekeeping allow honey bee populations to evolve and to survive well. Indeed, on pages 9 – 13 of this Journal you can read about beekeeping in the rainforest of South West Ethiopia and recent work done by us for the international cosmetic company,
The Body Shop, to confirm for them that the beekeepers are harvesting honey and beeswax in highly sustainable ways, and indeed helping to safeguard the precious rainforest.
We have argued many times for careful use of beekeeping vocabulary! We encourage an end to the use of unhelpful terms, ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ beekeeping, descriptions that are widely, inaccurately, and unscientifically used elsewhere. We are delighted now to welcome a new term to our beekeeping vocabulary: Darwinian beekeeping. Professor Tom Seeley described this concept, at the Bee Audacious gathering which took place in California in December. It is a perfect, scientific description of the simple, natural beekeeping that is practised by many readers of this Journal. We might even say that it is traditional!
