THE GARDEN HIVE

Fall 2010 Bees' Last Chance to Gather Food for Winter

2010-09-25T10:04:00.013-04:00

To newcomers, welcome to The Garden Hive blog. We are top-bar hive advocates and Bill, the woodworker, makes top-bar hives. Our website is TheGardenHive.com. I'm Carol, the beekeeper.

Here in the piedmont of North Carolina, honey bees are active, building up their stores for winter. Some of the blooming plants are goldenrod, asters, and smartweed. Smartweed is considered a weed by many gardeners who pull it up, but it is a plant that provides food for honey bees. I intentionally let an area of my garden free for smartweed growth. This photo shows a honey bee in the center. The pink flower is a morning glory. Smartweed ranges from white through pink.

We're excited about Bill's latest design for The Garden Hive. It has many features specifically helpful to top-bar hive owners. Details will soon be posted on our website, TheGardenhive.com. We will be offering several options, including a knock-down hive you can assemble yourself, a hive with double windows, a full-screen bottom board that can flip over to also hold oil to capture pesky hive beetles and other nuisances, and a work table platform that fits beneath the roof. The most exciting feature is a design that will enable Langstroth frames and top-bar frames to be exchanged from one type of hive to the other. We know of no other similar design. We'll be updating all the instructions, of course. A customer said she'd love to have a hive with a cooper roof, so that may be in the works.

I can tell you right now though that my first purchased bees absconded--meaning they just took off without a "Thanks, but we have to go" or anything! No explanatory note was left on a pillow. It was a shock and a disappointment. I've learned since then that this is not an uncommon occurrence, so I stopped taking it personally. After that we were very fortunate to obtain a swarm from a veteran beekeeper in the next county. This colony has been thriving and is building up nicely with several combs of brood and some honey.

But we installed them fairly late after the spring nectar flow, so I've been giving them a quart of sugar water several times a week. There will be another fall nectar flow but I don't know how much forage is going to bloom in the bees' foraging radius, 2-3 miles.

This brings up an important question: When hobbyists or honey sellers buy bees and build up 10-60 hives, do they know what forage habitats are available in their area? Could lack of forage and habitat be one reason we hear things like "half of my hives failed" sometimes? If some other reason is not evident?

As a result, I identified late summer and fall bee forage plants, like asters, goldenrod, and smartweed growing around my neighborhood, and at least for now, not mowing these stands of plants on my own property.

See a good article that informs and enlightens from the New York Times. Some good sidebar links as well.

Installing Bees to The Garden Hive

2010-03-28T15:06:00.040-04:00

On March 27, our new Italian bees arrived and we installed them in The Garden Hive. I was "suited up" but I didn't have to be. In most videos you'll see of installations, the beekeepers are not wearing protective gear. This is because new packaged bees tend to be very docile at installation time.

Many trees are blossoming here in the Piedmont of North Carolina so the honey flow should be good. We did add a sugar water feeder inside the hive, however, just to get them on the "right foot." Today, March 28 is windy, and I can tell the wind is slowing their flying activity. As soon as the wind dies down, I see many more bees at the landing area.
The bees arrive at our local ag center in a wooden box about the size of a shoe box. I carried it on my lap in the car as Bill drove us home. I had hoped he wouldn't take the curves in his usual Grand Prix style but no luck there.

The installation was quite easy. After prying off the cover panel of the box and prying the sugar water can out and up from the box, I took hold of the tab attached to the queen cage and gently pull out the cage. Here it is covered with dutiful workers and appears to be a cluster of grapes. I held it for a few minutes because of course the camera stopped working so we waited for recharged batteries!

Believe me, the bees had no interest in me. I really didn't need the gloves or veil, but I liked looking "official."

I gently shook off the bees and then pried out the cork plug from the queen cage. See knife tip.This exposed the sugar candy plug, which the bees will eat away in a few days.

Shake in the bees remaining in the box. They fall right out and into the Garden Hive.

They continue getting their "orders" via pheromones from the queen. It will be 3 or so days before the candy plug in her cage is eaten away and she will get out to start laying eggs. In the meantime, the bees will be working to create honeycomb. They are starting from zero, so feeding them sugar water and having a water source can be very crucial until they are bringing in sufficient nectar. At that point, they will stop slurping up your sugar water and you can take out the jar--until nectar flow slows again.

We filled in with top bars, but left the box on top for a couple of hours to allow the remaining bees to go into the hive. Once most are out of the box, we replaced the other top bars and placed the roof on top of the hive. Bees soon found the entrance holes. We stopped up two of the three entrances temporarily until the guard bees take their positions (we assume!). Also the bees are a bit vulnerable to predators until they get oriented to their new circumstances and environment.

Beek assistants inspect progress. Approved!

Beekeepers Buzz with Joy in New York CIty

2010-03-17T14:19:00.000-04:00

Urban beekeepers unite! NYC has lifted the ban on beekeeping. Read all about it here.

Now Is the Time

2010-03-15T12:12:00.000-04:00

Now is the time new (and old) beekeepers are deciding "how" they want to have bees. Now is the time to consider a top-bar hive as a natural alternative to a big box Langstroth hive that was designed specifically for industrial and commercial production of honey and they are used for transporting bees long distances for pollination services. The Garden Hive, made by Bill Rawleigh, a professional woodworker of 25 years, offers a simpler, more natural way of inviting bees into your garden. Read more below or at our website: thegardenhive.com.

The Garden Hive is

Attractive
The charming Garden Hive is a refined version of a centuries-old concept, the top-bar hive. It blends beautifully in the home, farm, or community landscape. You might expect it to appear in "The Tale of Peter Rabbit."

Fun
If you want the fun of learning about bees, easily checking in on their activities, and nurturing their development in a healthy, sustainable way, The Garden Hive is for you.

Natural
Unlike the familiar, commercial hives, The Garden Hive lets bees build their own honeycomb as they instinctively want to do. Honey and wax comb are made on the spot of the purest quality.

Beneficial
Provide a pollinator-friendly habitat and in return enjoy great pollination and prolific harvests from your garden.

Affordable & Low-Tech
Checking on your bees in easy as there are no heavy boxes to lift and no expensive equipment or premanufactured wax foundations of unknown origin to buy.

Sweet
Honey has proven healing, medicinal, and culinary benefits! Harvesting honey is simple. You lift out one bar of honeycomb at a time and cut off what you want. Once your bees are established, you'll have plenty of honey for your family and friends.

Revealing
The secret life of bees won't be a secret when you look in the observation window--a wonderful way to educate and appreciate.

See photos, details, bee news, and more at TheGardenHive.

New Website

2009-12-02T14:33:00.000-05:00

We have outgrown our blog! We are in the process of creating a full-fledged website at thegardenhive.com, but you can still access a lot of information here at the blog. We are keeping both active until the website design is satisfactory. Thank you for your patience and your interest in nature's most efficient pollinator and the top-bar hive.

Gardens and Honey Bees - A Mutual Benefit

2009-10-15T10:39:00.010-04:00

In North Carolina, be sure to check out Niche Gardens in Chapel Hill. They have all the pollinator plants and ideas for your pollinator garden.

The Garden Hive

2009-08-21T10:31:00.010-04:00

The Garden Hive is made by Rawleigh Woodworking, Inc., a millwork manufacturer for 25 years in Julian, NC. The design is a refinement of the top bar hive, early evidence of which has been excavated in Greece and Vietnam. With these movable-comb hives, early beekeepers could remove any single comb without cutting or breaking the wax. Today, this type of construction is preferred by many hobbyists and gardeners, and it is seen throughout the world in small farms. The Garden Hive offers an alternative to the commercial Langstroth hive, as it requires no heavy lifting or expensive equipment. It is low-stress for bees and low-tech for beekeepers. And as you can see, The Garden Hive is attractive in any landscape.

We offer The Garden Hive in decay-resistant cypress. It ships by UPS, FedEx, or Parcel Post completely assembled and ready for bees. The stand's legs attach with a few taps from a hammer and this added height allows for easy viewing of the bees. A closable bottom vent provides ventilation and a mite control screen. A full-length observation window allows you to monitor your bees’ activities and learn in “real-time” about the secret life of bees. A user’s manual, sugar water feeder, veil, and a hive tool are included. Dimensions: 42” long x 16”wide x 16” tall (not counting stand).

Get The Garden Hive. You can purchase The Garden Hive at Amazon.com by searching “garden hive.” We try to fill every order within 2 weeks, but please order 8 weeks before desired delivery. Or email us for more information. Click Here

Who buys the Garden Hive?

We have found that our customers tend to

have an interest in organic gardening and organic food in general.

are aware of our environmental challenges and want to help.

are serious gardeners or nurserymen interested in improving their yields.

have a family history of beekeeping.

are interested in keeping bees but are hesitant to invest in complicated, high maintenance commercial type hives.

love honey!

More About The Garden Hive

A Lone Bee

We started thinking about keeping our own honeybees when we saw a lone bee on our yard of clover blossoms. Our once prolific apple tree bore few apples. The vegetable garden produced handfuls rather than basketfuls of vegetables. We started researching pollination, the honeybee's role in nature and in our food chain, and the honeybee population's struggle to survive worldwide.

That’s when we realized we needed The Garden Hive.

What’s Special About the Garden Hive?

1. In The Garden Hive, bees settle in a natural, low stress, low interference home. The top bar design is different from the commercial Langstroth hive in significant respects. You’ll find advocates for both kinds among bee enthusiasts. Which you prefer will depend on your objective for beekeeping and what you conclude from current knowledge about sustainability.

2. In The Garden Hive (a top bar design), bees create their own honeycomb, determining the cell sizes they need.

For a commercial Langstroth hive, you buy pre-made frames with a manufactured foundation that dictates all one cell size to be built (in other words, no natural bee-produced honeycomb).

3. With The Garden Hive, harvesting honey is low-tech, manual, inexpensive, and optional. You pull out a bar and examine it. If it is suitable for harvesting honey, you simply cut the comb with its honey off the bar into a bucket or container. Some prefer to preserve the comb with the honey. If you want to separate honey from comb, you do it manually.

A Langstroth hive requires “supers,” boxes containing manufactured foundations (in place of the bees’ own honeycomb), which can be stacked several feet high and weigh up to 100 pounds when full of honey. Honey extractor kits, averaging $500, spins the frame to separate out the honey.

4. The top bar design mimics the bees’ natural environment, and beekeepers who prefer it are more interested in letting bees do things their way to build a strong colony, with minimal interference. Chemicals and pesticides are avoided. When honeybees are plentiful in your garden or orchard, you benefit with prolific harvests of well-formed vegetables and fruit and good seed formation for next year's crop of food and flowers. A sweet and sustainable relationship!

5. The Garden Hive’s large glass observation side window allows monitoring of the bees activities and a “real-time” educational look at the secret life of bees.

6. The Garden Hive is an attractive addition to the home, community, or farm garden.

Also, see Philip Chandler's (author of The Barefoot Beekeeper) description of the top bar design in general. Just click here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How much of my time will the Garden Hive require?

A: If you are interested in collecting honey, honeycomb, or pollen you’ll need to learn when and how. If you are keeping bees solely for their value as pollinators your responsibilities may be few. You should provide food in the form of simple sugar syrup to help your bees through periods of low nectar supply, and you should monitor the nest to see how the colony is faring. The observation window makes this easy.

Connect to your local beekeeper association. Take a beekeeping class. Learn what plants—ornamental flowers, herbs, vegetables, trees, and grasses-- bees pollinate. These should be plentiful within the bees’ range.

Q: How does The Garden Hive work?

A: The Garden Hive is much simpler to maintain than the "stack of white boxes" beehives most people are familiar with. An owner’s manual is shipped with each hive. In this hive, you can remove the top “roof” and pull out any of the wooden bars. Each bar is the starting point for the bees to build a hanging honeycomb. The bars are precisely sized to allow “bee space” for the bees to move around the hive. Commercial hives have a frame and a template honeycomb that forces the bees to build within that manufactured comb. In The Garden Hive, bees build their own combs to their own needs and the comb itself is therefore harvestable when appropriate. Some honey harvesters prefer comb in their honey jars, or honey and comb can be separated manually. See James Satterfield’s website on top bar beekeeping at http://www2.gsu.edu/~biojdsx/main.htm and http://hirschbachapiary.com/default.aspx.

Q: Do I need any special equipment?

A: We recommend purchasing a veil to wear over a wide-brimmed hat. You can wear garden gloves and a suit of heavy clothing for additional protection. Although most honeybees are not aggressive and many keepers handle them without protection, we strongly recommend obtaining an EpiPen from your pharmacy. Other than protective equipment, a small pry bar or stout knife is useful in removing honey comb.

Q: How do I get started?

A: We recommend that you contact your local beekeepers group and take one of their classes. Most beekeepers are hobbyists and are eager to help beginners. The Garden Hive does not include bees. You can buy bees from bee package sellers or obtain from local beekeepers. Early spring is the time to start a hive, but orders for bees are usually due by January or February.

Q: Where can I learn more?

A: We’ve listed some excellent sites on the blog sidebar that discuss the top bar hive specifically and honeybee research and growing public interest generally. You’ll find fascinating information and discussions about nature’s perfect pollinator.

Q: Is there a guarantee that I will be successful and be able to harvest honey from my hive?

A: No. Honeybee populations worldwide are declining for many reasons. Some we are familiar with include loss of habitat, heavy-handed pesticide and herbicide use, pests and diseases, genetic modification of crop species, environmental toxins, and rapid climate change. With your help and careful attention, however, you can help the honeybee survive this period of environmental stress and enjoy plentiful fruits of pollination as well as a harvest of pure honey, beeswax and other hive products.

Remember, the honeybee is responsible for pollinating one third of our food crops.

We need the honeybee more than the honeybee needs us.

Humans and Honeybees:

The Current State of Affairs

Google “honeybees” and you’ll find fascinating - often passionate - discussions taking place all over the world, foundations dedicated to their survival, and even Congressional bills to promote studies of their habitat (Pollinator Habitat Protection Act 2007). The Web links here are some of the best--specific to top bar hive management and the state of honeybee health in general. Learn more and join the discussion. Also, we hope you’ll send your comments, reading suggestions, and stories to our blog.

Plight of the Honeybee

While commercial beekeepers are in business to pollinate enormous acreages of food production—no small service!—they are facing alarming die-offs of their colonies (colony collapse disorder- CCD, which affects local hives as well). Explanations of causes and cures abound. Theories of causes include the commercial transporting of bees over long distances from region to region where the bees are released to work a monoculture (not their preferred habitat), exposure to pesticides as well as the diseases and predators in each region, and a regimen of antibiotics that, as in humans, prompt bacteria to develop resistance over time. It is believed that with their natural behavior altered and their natural resistance stressed, bees become more vulnerable to a host of old and new threats.

As the slow food movement brings food production closer to home, into our backyards and community gardens, it only makes sense that we provide honeybees a low-stress, healthy home. You’ll find many beekeepers who believe that with less manipulation, pressure, and interference from us, bees will build a strong colony and maintain strong immunity to thwart predators and disease alike.

For an in-depth report on research findings regarding the current threat to bees’ health, see http://live.psu.edu/story/25747

However, while IAPV [a virus] may be a marker for CCD, proving that any organism is the cause of IAPV is somewhat more difficult. . . . Beside general health stress from the heavy load of pathogens normally carried by bees, other suggested contributors to CCD include pesticides, drought and nutritional stress.” -- From Penn State Live News Release: “Bee researchers close in on Colony Collapse Disorder,” Friday, September 7, 2007

There are many approaches and theories about the best beekeeping practices. But as the Penn State report indicates, you find a strong consensus that bees thrive where there is plant diversity, a stable, local, natural habitat, and no pesticides.

A Message from Phil Chandler

"Putting Syngenta in charge of UK research into the causes of honeybee deaths is arguably the equivalent of putting the tobacco companies in charge of research into lung cancer, or asking the manufacturers of alco-pops to research the causes of teenage binge drinking." *

If you have not already heard, the giant pesticide manufacturer Syngenta has positioned itself as overseers of UK research into honeybee problems (see http://tinyurl.com/yeryyfl for full story). This means that we can wave goodbye to any truly objective British bee research, as - according to the press release announcing the funding - not one of the nominated university departments will be looking at pesticides as a potential cause of honeybee deaths.

At least part of the blame for such a reprehensible state of affairs can be laid squarely on the BBKA Executive Committees - past and present - for having sanctioned the endorsement deal with Syngenta and Bayer that lead to the BBKA's subsequent silence on the pesticides issue.

If you have not already seen it, I really recommend you watch the film The Vanishing of the Bees (see http://vanishingbees.co.uk/screenings for UK dates & venues). Better than anything I have yet seen on the subject, it examines the causes of bee die-offs in the USA and in Europe, and concludes - as so many others have done - that our toxic agricultural system is at the root of the bees' problems. I watched it last night, and afterwards answered questions from the audience, who were audibly shocked to hear that the BBKA takes money from Syngenta and Bayer for endorsing their pesticides. They were also clearly shocked at the extent to which the history of such companies is enmeshed with the Nazi's production of wartime nerve gas, and the web of lies they have spun around the real extent of the toxicity of many of their products. Even Bayer's flagship aspirin is now known to do more harm than good in healthy people (http://tinyurl.com/kwfpal), contrary to what the manufacturers have been telling us for 100 years.

Vested interests are the real causes of bee deaths - of that I am convinced. Profit is God: shareholders' interests must be placed before the public good at all costs. Research that discovers inconvenient truths is suppressed: research departments that step out of line have their funds withdrawn. Don't just take my word for it - Scientists For Global Responsibility have just published a paper entitled 'Science and the Corporate Agenda: the detrimental effects of commercial influence on science and technology (see http://tinyurl.com/yh2jmg7 for free download).

But there is hope. The Co-op has done a great job of drawing attention to the neonicotinoid issue by banning them from their 25,000 hectares of UK farmland and by sponsoring The Vanishing of the Bees. They are also funding research into the effects of pesticides on bees. There is a growing organic farming movement and more and more beekeepers are turning to more natural, chemical-free methods - finding that the Varroa mite is not such a problem as we have been led to believe.

So what can you do?

Friends of the Bees has been launched and will become more active as time and funds permit. Please support this new charity, which is devoted to the interests of all bees - and especially honeybees.

Support our friends in the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, Bees for Development and the Global Bee Project, who are also doing excellent work.

Take a look at how you shop - could you do more to support organic and other chemical-free food producers - especially local ones?

Take a long look at your beekeeping methods with a view to focusing more on the underlying health of your bees, and less on the honey crop. To paraphrase a well-worn phrase: think not what your bees can do for you, but what you can do for them.

Phil Chandler
links:
Friends of the Bees - www.friendsofthebees.org
The Barefoot Beekeeper - www.biobees.com
Natural Beekeeping Network - www.naturalbeekeeping.org
Co-op Plan Bee - http://vanishingbees.co.uk/plan_bee
Vanishing of the Bees screenings - http://vanishingbees.co.uk/screenings/
Bumblebee Conservation Trust - www.bumblebeeconservation.org.uk
Bees for Development - www.beesfordevelopment.org
Global Bee Project - www.theglobalbeeproject.com

* Graham White, a beekeeper and environmental author, commenting on Syngenta funding research into the disappearance of honeybees, The Herald, 4 October 2009

Fun with PhotoShop

Finally, here's a view about what good we humans might do by not doing too much.

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/175/