Bees for Development Journal 133 December 2019
Natural beekeeping in Sicily Danilo Colomela (translation by Giulia Lepori), Italy Photos © Michał Krawczyk
I was born in Palermo, a big city in Sicily. In 2005 I decided to live away from the city. Together with my wife Simona we moved to Sagana, a rural area approximately half an hour by car from Palermo. Here we found what we were looking for: tranquillity, contact with nature, and the possibility to experiment with a simple life of reduced consumption. The place is too beautiful and the house too big to be lived in by only the two of us. Therefore, we decided to establish the Centre for Development of Consciousness – Thar dö ling (www.centrothardoling.it). We imagined the Centre as a gym where it would be possible to train the consciousness, like an instrument for positive change in the person and in the community. At first we continued to work in the city – a commuting life – which allowed us also to renovate the buildings. After some time and with the help of permaculture (a methodology to design sustainable human settlements) we understood that the Centre and the place itself could become the very source of our livelihood. With this new outlook, we redesigned our life in a systemic way, and we began inserting various elements into the project, for example aromatic plants, donkeys and fruit trees, to create a productive and resilient system on different levels. One of these elements is the honey bee with the numerous functions that she carries out.
Checking the health of the colony In this initial phase I focused on the main goal of understanding if there is a form of beekeeping that can totally avoid treatments, the inhibition of swarming, nutrition and commercial hybrids. The colonies that I breed come from swarms, and from settled colonies that I caught, which have the genetics related to the territory where I live. After six years, I noticed that there are colonies that survive (in my experience, around 20% of caught swarms) and others that do not survive. Those that did not make it all died by the end of the second year and, among them, 80% by the end of the first year. The loss of a colony is always painful, but death is part of life. I think that it is not useful to excessively help a colony that does not have the genetics for the territory where they live.
In 2010 we asked an expert beekeeper, Giovanni Caronia, to install some of his frame hives on our land to learn by observing his work. After three years the will arose to have an exclusive relationship with the bees and I delved into the theme of natural beekeeping, which really fascinated me, particularly because of the similarities with Fukuoka’s natural agriculture. In 2013 I built my first top-bar hive. I chose this horizontal hive as I considered it very didactic from my beginner’s point of view.
Another important fact that I have observed is that the freedom of swarming eventually leads to an overall reduction of such impulse, which means that
The colony is looking very healthy
Honey extraction using a press 6
