We had a great time at the event in Seven Springs, PA that Mother Earth News sponsored. I was able to meet many of you, and for those who was not able to make it, here is the link to the videos of my presentation on sustainable beekeeping. Feel free to ask me any questions that the videos my cause to pop into your head.

Previously posted on The Honey Bee Conservancy blog

Imagine that you are a commercial beekeeper. The rule of thumb is that you need 500 or more hives to justify keeping bees as a full time job. That is a lot of money tied up in equipment.
You have a bank note that you pay on annually for said equipment with proceeds from the honey crop. Uh oh. You see mites. You follow the advice of the experts that monitor the bee problems. They recommend you take action with some chemical or other intervention. Whew! You make your order and while you are waiting for it to arrive…
…You go to your monthly local bee club meeting. And the new guy is talking about natural beekeeping. He has found that you can stop placing chemicals and high fructose corn syrup in your hives.
“Geez”, you say, “but the HFCS is so much cheaper than honey. How can I compete with the commercially produced and imported honey that is sold at the local grocery store? You want me to let my bees eat honey all winter? How will I make my payments to the bank? You say I need to stop medicating? What if I lose all my bees? I have my whole life tied up in this operation. I can’t take that risk. If the government will compensate me for my losses, why should I take that risk?”
You have to admit that is a tough spot to be in. I can see them lying awake at night wondering what to do. You also might wonder if the government would really give beekeepers relief payments. Well they did this year.
Is the beekeeping industry too big to fail?
The “industry” yes. Nature, never.
In nature, nothing is too big to fail. If an organism weakens it is consumed by another one that is stronger. Natural selection takes over. The weak animals succumb to the predators, and the strong animals reproduce and the whole of nature is balanced and benefited in the process. But when the government manipulates the free markets by giving our hard earned money to the honey producers, it prevents the hard cold reality from taking place– if something isn’t working we must stop doing it. If commercial beekeeping is not sustainable, we must not prop it up.
If the corn producers were not being subsidized by our hard earned money, then HGCS would likely never have replaced sugar in the first place. Do you see how this system has gone so far off that it is almost entirely based and propped up by the government subsidies? So much so that honey isn’t really natural anymore. It isn’t made entirely from nectar, it’s made up of industrially created chemicals.
Commercial beekeeping is failing, and the only beekeepers that will thrive in the future are the ones who learn to respect the bee’s needs, and help create a market of clean honey that will sell for a much higher price. Because if there is enough demand for clean honey, the market will be willing to pay what a beekeeper needs to makes end meet.
We cannot keep trying to compete with the cheap import honey. We need to expose the fact that much of that cheap honey is actually HFCS. Whatever you feed your bees, it ends up in the honey comb. Whatever you spray on your crops, it ends up in the honey comb. Whatever you place in your hive, it ends up on your bees and goes straight into the honey comb So when you extract the honey you are eating whatever the bees have eaten, and whatever they carried in and placed in the cells.
The future of beekeeping belongs to the small producer who can spread the word that their honey is not the same thing that you buy in the grocery store. And with your help, the informed public will gladly pay the real market price for the real honey.
So you ask, “how can I help?”
1. Stop spraying your lawns and gardens. You are what your food eats.
2. Plant the plants that beneficial insects, like bees, need.
3. Get to know your local producers of honey. At your local farmers market, start chatting with the beekeepers there. Ask them how they keep bees. Do they feed HFCS? Do they place chemicals in the hive? Do they heat the honey which can kill the helpful enzymes? Or are they simply a retailer of honey and don’t know where it comes from?
4. Nurture your own bees.

I walked to the back 40 this morning with my two teenage sons and our very excited family dog to pick blackberries. As I reached into the thorny bush to gently massage a clump of juicy ripe berries, I was struck with the thought of how quickly nature heals herself if we let her.
Several years ago, one of our neighbors had a bulldozer come in and make 3 large piles of logs and brush out of 6 acres of beautiful native forest. I grumbled about it to my wife on more than one occasion and was excited when they wanted to sell. We bought it, and forgot about it. I’m sure our other neighbors grumbled about us not brush hogging it like a responsible land owner does.
This year we have a bumper crop of wild blackberries covering the land. You can’t even see the ground, as the brush is so thick. Where there was once disturbed soil, there is now fertile and productive growth. The microbes and worms in the soil are recovering nicely and the erosion has stopped.
Unless we interfere, over time that area will once again be an old growth forest with tall majestic trees.
What does this have to do with honey bees?
Nature is quite consistent. She never gets discouraged and always recovers.
The honey bees are recovering from our ignorance and interference. There are beekeepers who are prospering. They are the ones who listen to the bees and respond with as little manipulation as possible.
But what about the beekeepers who have been taking the government handout/bailouts? I suspect that if we were to look closer we would find that those beekeepers aren’t working with nature but against her. The irony is… they are being rewarded for over managing or even mismanaging their hives.
At Beelanding were not offering bailouts but rather, information, ideas, workshops, hands-on experience, and a bee friendly bee hive. What we are doing here takes work and experimentation. I’ve been thinking what kind of handout I can offer. Hmmmmm….. seems like the best I can do is to offer you a cool glass of blackberry mead, when you pay us a visit.

An 89 year old man attended our beekeeping club several months back, and didn’t say much, so after the meeting I pulled him aside to visit with him. I asked him about his bees, and he told me that he had two hives and has been keeping bees for over 50 yrs. I asked him how they were doing and with a bit of embarrassment and more like a confession he told me that he really didn’t medicate them, and that he just left them alone other than to harvest in the fall. So I asked him if his bees were surviving, and he said that he had all the honey that he and his friends could eat, and when one of his colonies died out, he simply catches a local swarm to repopulate the hive.

This is what the natural beekeeping trend is attracted to. Small hobby beekeepers who can supply friends, family, and maybe a farmers market, with delicious local honey, and enjoy the great hobby in the process.

The beekeeping process has become an industrial process, and I will briefly run through the list here, with more in-depth explanation in later posts.

Shipping queens and package bees from the southern states, rather than working with local genetics.

Feeding refined sugar and High Fructose Corn Syrup rather than letting them keep and eat their own honey.

Making the bees live in a toxic environment.

Moving the bees around the country for pollination.

Placing the bees in a thin box rather than a hollow log environment.

And last but not least…they make the bees larger than nature intended.

All of these changes have consequences, and all these added together are weakening the colonies which attract mites and other pests, and the bees are dying. So…what do the commercial beekeepers do about it? They cry about this mysterious disorder and label it CCD, and then they stand in line for the government bail outs.

Now before you get as depressed as I often do about the situation, read my blog post from The Honey Bee Conservancy that may give you hope.