Natural beekeeping
Article
Natural beekeeping encompasses approaches to keeping bees which – as far as possible – allow bees to live as they do in nature. This includes environmental, genetic and management dimensions.
Why is natural beekeeping important?
Natural beekeeping achieves a healthy and resilient honey bee population, able to withstand – using their own immune and behavioural responses – hazards, pathogens and forage fluctuations. Natural beekeeping – and variants thereof – necessarily underpins the long-term welfare of the honey bee as a wild-living species. The alternative, intensive bee-farming, is forcing the species to be ever-more reliant on medication, supplementary feeding and artificial reproduction. Such a scenario makes the species vulnerable to shocks, and undermines their innate resilience.
Background
Research on honey bees during the past 70 years has revealed to us the wonderfully sophisticated behaviour that enables a honey bee colony to survive, and to adapt to changing circumstances. We are learning how the colony runs itself and ensures essential raising of young and housekeeping activities, manages supply and demand for nutrients, and their good storage, regulates its nest temperature and humidity, endeavours to cope with toxins, pests and predators, and deals with other external threats to their existence. We now know that bees achieve this by communicating in a variety of ways – including with scents (pheromones), vibrations and other special behaviours and ‘dances’. We appreciate more about the sophisticated architecture of the beeswax comb within a honey bee colony, and the type of space that bees choose to occupy in nature. We know that when seeking a new home for a swarm, the honey bee colony, like any house hunter, considers the vacant options available and reaches consensus on which to choose. We have learned far more about the amazing properties of honey, beeswax and propolis. This knowledge, understanding and appreciation of the honey bee colony as a super organism has encouraged many beekeepers to look again at conventional beekeeping. Thus the term ‘natural beekeeping’ has come into use to describe beekeeping in which the focus is upon the needs of the bees, above the desires of the beekeeper seeking maximum honey and convenience.
When Bees for Development began work in 1993, we already knew that in world regions where beekeepers keep their bees in simple hives, bees seemed to be everywhere abundant, and healthy. That is why we chose for our logo a tree bearing a simple, cylindrical bee hive. Nowadays more people have become interested in simple ways of beekeeping and ‘natural beekeeping’ fits the bill. There is no strict definition of the term, however natural beekeeping incorporates the following key principles:
Concerning the environment
Concerning genetics
Concerning management
It is certainly possible to practice excellent, bee-focussed beekeeping using conventional frame hives. However there are also many other styles of bee hives that enable a honey bee colony to nest more naturally than can be ever possible in a frame hive.
Beehives for natural beekeeping
Beehives are one of the principal management tools of the beekeeper and there are many different styles and designs. Some authors describe the use of simple hives as traditional beekeeping, however this term is used in contrast to modern, and tends to imply something that is out-of-date, unchanging, no longer sufficiently effective, or even ‘backward’. In fact the reverse is true – simple hives allow bees to live most naturally or as Langstroth put it ‘in a state of nature’, and modern science is helping us to understand the reasons why this helps them to survive well. More appropriate descriptors for beekeeping systems which use simple hives may be natural, economic, ecological, healthy or sustainable beekeeping.
Bee hive designs can be broadly categorised into those with movable combs, and those without. Those without movable combs are sometimes called fixed-comb hives. These are by far the easiest and cheapest to make and tend to provide a more ‘natural’ home for bees because the lack of comb movability does not allow for beekeepers to manipulate and interfere with the inner-workings of the honey bee nest. However, as can be seen from the natural beekeeping principles above, natural beekeeping is not solely determined by bee hive type.
Intensive beekeeping in frame hives
The honey bee that is native to the UK, and indeed all of Europe, the Middle East and all of Africa, is Apis mellifera. The biology and behaviour of this species varies markedly across its huge range – from north of the Arctic circle to Africa’s southernmost point, and this one species has many different races.
The widely-used, most conventional method of managing European races of honey bees in frame hives is now approaching a globalised method, utilising the same types of bees, containing the same range of pathogens, and being fed with sugar syrup to replace the harvested honey. This type of beekeeping is practised by many beekeepers in many countries. You can read more about intensive beekeeping here.
