Bees on the Farm
by Lindsay Dozoretz

This season on the Farm, meandering among the mullein and echinacea, the buckwheat flowers and the clover, there can be heard a different hum… It has the undercurrent of an audible frequency, the frenetic flurry of an urgent harvest, the consistent purr of a community set to task, and the distinctly ‘busy’ character for which these creatures are so famed… Meet the newest members of our farm ecosystem: honeybees!

These are newcomers to the Research Farm and Gardens this season. In fact, there are three rapidly populating communities enjoying the abundance of diverse nectar from all of the flowering plants on the farm. Lucky for us, these communities can fit 50,000 strong in a single box—otherwise known as a beehive—and they perform a myriad of important functions for us, and for the earth.

Pollination is extremely important to crop production, and it also serves to maintain the diversity and health of wild plant ecosystems. Bees are some of nature’s most important pollinators, and they are essential to the preservation of biodiversity, and to the natural propagation of plant life. I embarked on a beekeeping project here at the Seeds of Change Farm and Gardens in order to ensure the consistent and perpetual presence of pollinators. In addition, the bees provide a source of honey, beeswax, propolis and other products. They also provide an incredible educational opportunity. Observing and interacting with bees is like no other skill I have endeavored to acquire—there is nothing quite like holding a loaded honeycomb, crawling with 2,000 bees, in your bare hands.

I wanted to do beekeeping in the most natural, sustainable way possible, so I adopted a permaculture beekeeping method called “top-bar,” first developed by beekeepers in Kenya. Top-bar beekeeping is a low-tech, ecological method for creating and maintaining a natural home for honeybees, while allowing for maintenance and usually some honey harvesting. This “organic apiculture” technique was designed with an emphasis on sustainability, and on keeping healthy bees. It creates a healthy environment for bee life, as well as for sustainable and less-invasive extraction of honey, reducing potential harm both to the bees and the beekeeper.

Top-bar hives are a low-cost, easy-to-build alternative to conventional Langstroth hives, catering more towards the maintenance of healthy and consistent bee populations than to maximum honey production. Top-bar hives mimic the structure of beehives in the wild, with the greatest difference being that top-bar hives allow the bees to build their own honeycomb, whereas Langstroth hives typically feature pre-fabricated combs for the bees to work with. It is speculated that bees—outfitted with wax glands and instinctively geared to make wax—are healthier building their own comb. Contrary to the uniformly sized comb cells in a Langstroth hive, bees, when left to their own devices, build parabolic combs with varying cell sizes. Apiarists are just starting to understand the reason for these different cell shapes and sizes, but many say it relates to the health of the hive.

Colony Collapse Disorder has been a powerful reminder of all the things we still don’t understand about bees and is perhaps associated with the heavy manipulation typical of many conventional hives. My belief is that the bees know what is best for themselves, and I endeavor to let them do whatever they need to do, and what they are accustomed to doing. I have found that top-bar beekeeping allows for, and even encourages, this approach. Importantly, I also let the bees find their own food, and their own medicine, in nature. My hives are as organic as our organic farm: no antibiotics, no mitocides, no chemicals.

Another feature of top-bar hives is the way the beekeeper interacts with the bees. Typically the queen builds her brood nest near the hive entrance (mine are on the northern end of a long eastern wall), backed by combs of mixed pollen and honey (bee food), backed further by pure honeycomb, which is the food that they store for winter. The hive design I used, created by New Mexico beekeeper Les Crowder, is sized so that I know when the bees have made enough food to survive the winter (between 12 and 15 full bars). It is then, and only then, that I will harvest the excess honey for my own use.

When I work in the hive, I lift out one bar at a time to inspect what is happening—if the queen is building good brood, if there is any sign of disease, or if there is excess honey. This way I am only disturbing that small section at any given time, and not lifting the roof off the entire colony. I move slowly and gently, trying to make our interaction sweet, not stressful for the bees, since stress can be quite damaging, especially to hives that are new and growing.

Our bees have been on the farm for only eight weeks. They arrived in “nucleus hives” of three bars of honeycomb, each set with their own queen. The queens were bred by Melanie Kirby and Mark Spitzig of Zia Queen Bee. Melanie, a hobby top-bar beekeeper, split some of her hives to give me three starter colonies. Since their arrival, the bees have been busy bringing pollen, growing bees and building wax—so much that the hives have grown from their original three bars of to between eighteen and twenty-three bars of brood, pollen, honeycomb and bees. For the Farm, the bees provide the invaluable service of pollination, as well as the means for small-scale honey and beeswax production.

For the bees, the Farm provides an ideal home, and food sanctuary. Since honeybees prefer to pollinate a diversity of flowers, our multitude of plant types and flower varieties suits their needs beautifully. This type of mutually beneficial relationship is the kind of thing we want to build on the Farm, increasing the sustainability of our on-site ecosystem.

So far, top-bar beekeeping has been an incredible learning experience. Not only have I been able to experience the collective energy of thousands of bees in my hands, but I truly feel as though I am building a rapport with the bees. I am coming to understand that each hive has a unique character and I’m learning to differentiate between the tones (moods?) of their buzz.

My hives sit with their entrances facing east, protected by the apple trees in our orchard. They are painted purple, orange and green (theoretically the bees recognize their home hive more easily if it is color differentiated), and I have named the queens (the steadfast leaders of the colony) Violet, Marigold and Sweet Pea. Sweet Pea is the rock starlet queen so far, with twenty-three bars of comb, and an abundant population of busy bees. But truly they are all thriving and, I believe I can say, happy. I expect they will build up their hives full for the winter, and that we might get a little bit of honey from them too.

If you are interested in starting a top-bar beehive of your own, see the following sources: www.biobees.com or www.outdoorplace.org or contact us for more information.