Category Archives: Honey Bee Heroes

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The resourcefulness of beekeepers…

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Recently I read a response to a blog post on Dennis Murrell’s Natural Beekeeping blog. Dianna wrote to describe how she had recycled oak fence boards into a Warre hive with her circular saw, for next to nothing in $$$ and happily, still has all her fingers!

We thought she was pretty smart, and the oak must look awesome!

Here’s what we said back to her:

Dianna – What a great example of recycling and resourcefulness! We would love to see a pic of your Warre hive – maybe you could post it on our Facebook page? It’s here: http://www.facebook.com/goldstarhoneybees and we love to see pictures! (We also love it when you click “like”if you like our Facebook page!)

There are a lot of extremely resourceful beekeepers out there – and many of them with a very well developed woodworker “gene”. They also understand the value of having interchangeable parts - so that beekeepers can work together. They understand that “a hive can save a hive” - an open bar of brood is the natural solution to a queenless hive. But the parts have to fit between hives!

So in addition to our “bells & whistles” Deluxe TBH hive ($495), which comes as a complete kit, we also have the plans for a Gold Star hive kit in both of our DIY kits - DIY#1 ($50) AND DIY#2 ($295).

The Deluxe kit contain all the wood, the glass window, the hardware, painted roof - everything - and goes together with nothing more than a screwdriver and a staplegun -

But with the DIY #1, YOU do ALL of the woodworking, and you are building the same box you see for sale on the website - and you know that it matches up with all existing Gold Star hives.

With a DIY #2, you build the box, roof and legs, but you GET the top bars. And if you’ve GOT the top bars, then you want to be darned sure it all works together, so we also include the follower boards. We like to call those follower boards “the keys to the kingdom” - because if you build the box to be a fit to the followers, then the top bars will also be a perfect fit. Voila! Gold Star quality, and hive interchangeability!

Both DIY kits include all the hardware as well. This is our response to the “Big Box Bubble Pack” – where you have to buy a plastic bubble package containing 60 of something you only need 14 of. Or a 100 foot roll of hardware cloth/screen that you only need 4 feet of.

And as Dennis mentioned - it’s very nice to have all your fingers - we think beekeepers should be able to count to ten! You can read Dennis’ blog (in its new format!) here: http://beenatural.wordpress.com/

There’s a video about our different kits here: http://youtu.be/AR_yaFnLnkU

You can find our website here: http://www.goldstarhoneybees.com.

And you can ask us questions here: [email protected]

Thanks for listening!

Christy Hemenway

Gold Star Top Bar Hives since 2007

About honey bees and January… and April…

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About honey bees and January… and April…

Beekeeping is funny, isn’t it? I mean, it’s a spring thing, right? The flowers are blooming, gardens are growing, bees are buzzing, it’s an exciting, growing time. But to understand how “things bee” get started up in the spring, you have to go backwards into the winter, to see how things arrived at spring. For instance, honeybees finish up the summer season and go into the hive in the fall, where they cluster, and they do something akin to hibernating all winter long. Continuing beekeepers have to force themselves to sit on their hands all winter long–you can’t open up a hive in freezing temperatures, at least not with happy results.

New beekeepers, on the other hand, who are just getting started in the spring, have been planning for their brand new hives since the dead of winter. So these beekeepers discover that ordering bees should be done in January! The honey bee suppliers that I talk with are, like me, usually sold out of package bees by mid-March at the latest. So new beekeepers are usually johnny-on-the-spot when it comes to ordering their first bees.

But consider the continuing beekeeper whose bees don’t overwinter. April is said to be the cruelest month in beekeeping, at least here in New England. Sometimes you see these hives flying in February, and again in March–but come April that hive is dead. That beekeeper did not even stand a chance when it came to ordering bees; and so, it’s not unusual for experienced beekeepers to order some packages of bees in January as “insurance”. Yes, that seems counterintuitive - if you think that’s odd, you’re right. January by rights is the month for sitting by the fire, and thumbing through your seed catalog, not for ordering honeybees.

The thing to know is this: if you are just beginning your beekeeping journey, be prepared to order package bees as early as possible. January is not too early. And if you are continuing your beekeeping journey, it is not a bad idea to order an insurance package, in the event that April does you wrong. The thing about having ordered a package in January, and then not needing it–is that now you have a cause for celebration! And a sad beekeeper, who didn’t order bees but then learned that their hive was gone in April, will celebrate too - and will be grateful to you when it turns out that you don’t need that package of bees.

So the moral is: order early, order often! It’s far more frustrating to need bees and not have them, then it is to have bees and not need them. I can almost guarantee you that somebody will be happy to get your “insurance package” when April rolls around. Of course, if your bees successfully overwintered, and now you have an additional colony, well - what part of this is a bad plan?

But when it comes to planning–if you think you *might* need bees–order bees. You’re not likely to be sorry. And besides, it’s a cheerful thing to think about bees when you’re huddling by the wood stove in January!

 

**For quality top bar beekeeping equipment, be sure to visit our webpage at http://www.goldstarhoneybees.com!**

A Christmas beekeeping blog…

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Beekeeping.

Just what IS beekeeping? Is it art? Is it science? Is it magic? It’s notoriously difficult to define… Is it a hobby? Is it a habit? Is it an obsession? Just what is it?

And what about those funny little bugs? Just what is it about bees? They sting, yes - so it’s prudent to be cautious when you’re around them - but they only sting when they’re defending something? Who knew? And it’s a kamikaze mission, that once-in- a-lifetime sting of a honeybee. They never do it frivolously - it’s a life or death proposition for the honeybee.

Yet beekeepers can be seen standing, sitting, lounging in the vicinity of their hives for hours, and just… watching. That’s it - just watching the bees flying in and out of the hive. It’s mesmerizing. It’s as if we think that if we watch long enough, we’re going to figure out their secret.

Truly, what we humans really know about honeybees is pretty limited. We cannot see inside the hive, we cannot see inside their minds, we barely even believe in a concept as advanced as a hive mind or a holistic super organism.

That’s probably one of the reasons that so much damage has been done - not only to the honeybee, but to our food system over the course of recent history. Because we don’t necessarily believe in magic or in a hive mind. We’re used to living isolated and alone, so how could this humble insect know, and live by, something so community-oriented, something so complex that we humans can’t understand it?

The honeybee has much to teach us about cooperation. Living and working together, taking only what we need, never damaging the planet that sustains us–but only ever helping and supporting it. We could go a long way on the things that we could learn from bees.

My Christmas wish to all of us would be this–that we take a lesson from the honeybees. That we learn to live in connection with the world around us–supporting and nurturing it, instead of industrializing and destroying it. That we learn to live in harmony with each other, recognizing the importance of each to the whole.

And as we take steps in that direction, we will find a sense of peace, of joy, of good will towards all men.

And that would make for a pretty good Christmas gift.

4th of July Message from Gold Star Honeybees

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Hello Fellow Top Bar Beekeepers -

Well, here we are - it’s almost the 4th of July. I know that all of you first year top bar beekeepers have had some interesting experiences since becoming a beekeeper this spring, some good, some bad, all of them different - and I just thought I’d offer a few insights to you all about the way beekeeping season progresses from my point of view as a beekeeper, bee school teacher and equipment manufacturer.

In the early spring, there’s a great deal of excitement - making plans, buying equipment, going to bee school, learning everything you can, waiting for your bees. We interact a lot - school is fun, questions are interesting, lots of anecdotes get passed around.

Then your bees come! Everyone is SO excited, and you all go home and put your bees in their hive, then wait and worry and wonder. You discover questions you hadn’t even thought to ask - how to do this or that, why are the bees doing x or y. Then your bees get their bearings and start doing what bees do. It’s fun and we all enjoy it. You tell your friends about your new enterprise.

At that stage, it gets pretty quiet at Gold Star Global Headquarters. I don’t hear from anybody. Sometimes I check to see if my phone is even getting a dial tone! Then the season progresses - to right about now, when folks have had their bees for somewhere between 4 - 8 weeks - and then I start to get a different set of questions.

And what I can generally tell by the 4th of July is that everyone is a little worried. Everyone would like a little reassurance. Everyone would like it if I could come and inspect their bees. Some of you even offer to pay me to come and inspect your bees. I appreciate it that you see me as such an expert!

But I hope that I have been able to get it across that the reality of beekeeping is that bees do what bees do - they are not machines, and they are definitely not predictable. We want to see them build a brood nest, and store honey. We inspect them and try to keep them making their combs straight so that our top bar hive remains a “moveable comb” hive. But other than offering them sugar syrup to supplement what nature provides, or providing a new queen, or the means to make a new queen if needed, or monitoring for mite levels - there is not much we can actually do to change the course of things happening in the hive. Nature is in control of that process and it is for us to watch in wonder. That means that sometimes we will see things thrive, sometimes not.

Nature is awesome and in the face of her wisdom, we often feel powerless. I get it. Sometimes it’s thrilling, sometimes it’s heartbreaking. Often it makes me feel small and inadequate.

So I know how much you want that reassurance. There are days that I want it too. I wish I could provide it. But as Gold Star Honeybees grows - that becomes less and less feasible. Which is truly bittersweet for me - I would love to stay personally connected to each and every one of you and see all of your bees.

But this growing is also a good thing. Because it means that together we are building a larger community! It’s getting more bees onto natural beeswax and into treatment-free lifestyles, and away from contaminated wax foundation and “Big Ag” style manipulations. For most of you, that was the reason you gave for starting this journey - to keep healthier bees - for the bees, for beekeepers, and for the planet.

So I just want to remind you that what you’ve done is take a very bold, brave step. You’ve become an iconoclast - breaking with established systems and practices that no longer make sense, and you’ve struck out and begun doing this very different thing, and I know that you sometimes feel very alone.

But all of you are Thinking Beekeepers - and I just want to repeat to you what you may have heard first at the end of a Gold Star Weekend Intensive class:

“Walk on, Beekeeper - this journey matters.”

Thanks for listening. All the Best to you and your bees. And have a great 4th of July weekend.
:-)
- Christy

22 Days to Swarming? Wow! That doesn’t seem good…

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I hived a good sized package of bees on Friday May 20th in a Gold Star Top Bar Hive here in the Gold Star Apiary…

Yesterday, June 11th I did an inspection. This makes the hive 22 days old.

While I was pleased to see several bars of capped honey – which is a little surprising in a three week old hive, I was surprised as well that I found several torn open queen cells – on the edges of the comb. This edge of comb placement would indicate that they were “swarm” cells, not “supercedure” cells, and there was very little brood in the comb, another indication of a “queen replacement event” – since there is a “break” in the brood cycle when a colony swarms or supercedes their queen.

But 22 days seems very early for a colony to swarm, and since it’s difficult to say whether the population of the hive has dropped – we are mulling over whether they might have swarmed despite our disbelief, or superceded with a cell built closer to the edge than one would expect.

The other nagging concern that this brings up is the concern about just what are we doing to bees by selling packages and shipping them from hot southern climates to colder places such as New England? The bees in the package we hived came from Georgia – and had been foraging for months in that climate. Not much information is available about the effects of the shock of being shipped and having to start over again in an area where temperatures and forage are just getting started in May. We have heard a lot of stories of queen failures this season, so it is worrisome.

But at any rate – they’re building wax and filling it with stores and we’ll look again in a week or so and see whether we are seeing the laying pattern of a new and healthy queen, or whether some catastrophe has occurred and they are now queenless altogether!

That will bring up new and different stuff to talk about!

The Comfort of Why…

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Everybody’s heard it - the insistent, persistent voice of a small child asking “Why?”

They start with one question and then dig deeper and deeper - to your every best answer - there is another “Why?”, another “Why?” and yet another “Why?” Eventually the questions become impossible to answer and the line of questioning comes to an abrupt end, sometimes with a bit of frustration on the part of the adult.

But we really never stop wanting to know “Why?”, do we? As adults, it’s comforting to know that there is a reason for the things that happen. Without a sense of cause and effect we feel lost and out of control. More importantly, if we know why something happens, we know what to do to cause the effect, and what not to do if we want to prevent said thing from happening.

So it’s challenging to live in a world where we can’t always know the “why” of things. And beekeeping is a prime example of such a world. There are a multitude of variables involved in the keeping of bees - weather, location, colony strength, queen fecundity, availability and quality of forage, temperature, pests and pesticides - just to name a few of the possibilities.

As a business owner, and even more, as a teacher in the top bar hive beekeeping world - it pains me when I am unable to give concise, scientific answers to the questions I am asked by students - answers that soothe and satisfy, instead of insisting that the student be brave, and to come along and learn to live in the uncertain world of nature and beekeeping.

Occasionally we get a little crazy in our search for the reasons why things happen with bees. This can lead to some interesting superstitions! At that point it’s a little like wearing your lucky t-shirt to help the Red Sox win! It makes us feel better - if it works.

But sometimes the answer is “It depends.” This is the answer to things like “How much honey does the average hive produce?” “Will my bees swarm in their first year?”

Then sometimes, the only answer is “I don’t know.” This is a hard one - both for the teacher to offer, and for the student to hear. It’s frequently the answer to “Why didn’t my bees thrive?” It’s especially frustrating to have two hives side by side, and to see one thrive and the other fail - and not be able to discern the why of that.

So one of the hardest lessons in beekeeping is learning that we can’t always know “Why?”. It’s knowing that, and still keeping bees anyway - for the love of the bees, for their pollination skills, and for their wonderful “nectar of the gods” that convinces me that the world is full of “thinking beekeepers” - caring, resourceful, thoughtful people - who will be the folks who help to shift the paradigm from industrial agriculture and its attendant beekeeping practices to S.O.L.D. farming - Small, Organic, Local, and Diverse.

Because that certainly looks to be the only sane direction in a world where you can’t always get the answer to “Why?”.

Top Bar Beekeeping 101 - Weekend Intensive

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Announcing Gold Star Honeybees’ next Top Bar Beekeeping 101 - Weekend Intensive!

Saturday and Sunday, March 5 and 6 at the Morris Farm in Wiscasset, Maine.

Regular tuition is $175 - but earlybirds save $25 when they register before February 25th. That’s only $150 for two full days of bee buzz!

Tuition includes breakfast and lunch both days - and be aware that when we say we feed you - we look for the very best organic food we can come up with - because we’ve got to make the connection sooner or later — ORGANIC IS A BEE’S BEST FRIEND!

Enroll online!

Detailed description of our Weekend Intensive.

Special Note: We will be video-taping this class as part of our plan to make the Weekend Intensive available to on-line students who aren’t so fortunate as to be able to come to Maine. Don’t be shy - you can help spread the word about healthy bees!

Sign up soon - procrastinating costs money!

And if you’re interested in hosting this class in an area near you (and that could mean anywhere on earth) - email us at [email protected]. We will be happy to send you our Hosting Package and the Planning worksheet with details on how you could host one and may even find that it raises some amount of funds for you as host.

Get ready for spring 2011!

What are you waiting for? We can’t wait to meet you!

 

Gold Star Honeybees, PO Box 1061, Bath, ME 04530 207-449-1121 www.goldstarhoneybees.com

Just how big should a top bar hive be?

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Just how big should a top bar hive be?

There is often lively discussion on beekeeping forums about the appropriate size for a top bar hive. And frequently this data is given in inches - such as the length of the hive, or in numbers, as in the number of top bars the hive will hold.

But from the bees’ point a view, an important consideration is the VOLUME of the hive. Just how big is the space they are planning to live in? Being able to calculate the volume tells you more about the size of the cavity WITHIN the hive - and since bees are “cavity nesters” - meaning that they will go inside this cavity and create the structure of their nest - the honeycomb - then VOLUME is probably what the bees are concerned with. It doesn’t really matter how tall a tree is, or even how big around it is - if the volume of the hollow cavity inside the tree isn’t large enough for the bees purposes then it isn’t a suitable home.

Now some of us can measure the time since we sat in a geometry class in units called decades, so conjuring up a formula to calculate area or volume might be a bit of a challenge.

Combined with the fact that most top bar hives have sloped sides in an attempt to ask the bees not to build their honeycombs attached to the sides of the box - which creates a trapezoid instead of a rectangle — and now things are really complicated!

Just how do you do the math on a three-dimensional trapezoid?

Well, here’s how it works:

The formula for the area of the trapezoid is this:

A = (( a + b) / 2) x h -> where h is the height, and a and b are the lengths of the parallel sides, in other words, the top and bottom.

When you have that number, the area, you multiply it by the length of the inside of the hive, and voila - now you’ve got the volume of your top bar hive.

So if we were to calculate the area of a Gold Star Top Bar Hive - it would look like this. We are showing here the dimensions of our “follower board”, since that exactly matches the interior size and shape of the hive body itself.

a = 15 inches
b = 6.1875 inches
h = 9.5 inches

Note: The decimal equivalent of 3/16 = .1875. This makes the math easier. (For some of us, fractions were a long time ago too!)


So, a + b would be 15 + 6.1875 = 21.1875 inches.
Then you would divide 21.1875 by 2. This will get you 10.59375
Multiply that by 9.5 and get 100.64. This figure is square inches - the area of the trapezoid, i.e. the follower board.

Then, to get the volume, you multiply the area 100.64, by the length of the interior of the hive. A Gold Star hive is 44.5 inches long inside, and voila` - now you know that the volume of the cavity inside a Gold Star hive is 4478.5 cu inches.

Now we think that’s a lot of math, and apparently somebody else did too, because some kind and smart person made it much easier - by creating an on-line calculator that will do the math for you - all you have to know is the dimensions of your trapezoid.

Much easier!

http://www.onlineconversion.com/object_volume_trapezoid.htm
Here is the actual formula:

volume = L * (b1 + (b2 - b1) * h1 / h + b1) * h1 / 2
where: Base1 (b1)
Base2 (b2)
Total Height (h)
Partial Height (h1)
Length (L)
Volume
This calculator works to calculate a “partially filled tank”, so for a “filled tank”, you would set the partial height (h1) and total height (h) as the same number.

So gather up your dimensions, plug them into the Online Conversion calculator and then you’ll know a bit about what the bees are looking at when they look at your hive!

The internet is a very big place! Or… sorting through it all – Part II

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So… Here we are again. The internet certainly hasn’t gotten any smaller since last we wrote.

I wanted to tell you about some more sources of information that are available on the internet - these ones a bit more “formal”…

Many of the universities in these United States have got tremendous research departments. Some of them are hot on the subject of bee research and have great stuff published on-line available for our perusal. Here is a very short list to get you started:

The Mid-Atlantic Apiculture Research and Extension Consortium (MAAREC) has been at the forefront of Colony Collapse Disorder research with the CCD Working Group - lots of CCD research results can be found here: https://agdev.anr.udel.edu/maarec/tag/ccd-working-team/. This group also studied 887 wax, pollen, bee and associated hive samples - finding 121 different pesticides and metabolite in those samples including coumaphos and fluvalinate. We at Gold Star Honeybees had our wax testing by this same group and are proud and happy to say that our sample came up clean! More details on that data can be found here: http://www.goldstarhoneybees.com/shopcontent.asp?type=wax

The University of Georgia has a lot going on in the way of bee research - including an important study by Jennifer Berry and Keith Delaplane - concerning the sublethal effects of four chemicals that have been used in-hive to treat honey bee colonies in the USA. Findings from the testing for sublethal effects of some commonly used hive chemicals can be found here: http://www.extension.org/page/ABRC2010_A_Test_for_Subacute_Effects_of_Some_Commonly_Used_Bee_Hive_Chemicals

A good article from the Managed Pollinator CAP (Coordinated Agricultural Project) can be found here: http://www.beeccdcap.uga.edu/documents/CAPArticle2.html. This article is titled “When Varroacides Interact” and gives a good description of the effects of combined varroa mite control methods and the effects of such “drug interactions”.

Then there’s Dr. Seeley at Cornell. An expert on swarms - his research seems like it would be a tremendous amount of fun to be a part of. Info on his swarm work can be found here: http://www.nbb.cornell.edu/seeley.shtml

So with all of this information, it’s unlikely that you’ll ever get to the last page of the internet. The one thing we strongly encourage all beekeepers to do is to take in lots and lots of information, and put it all into your “colander”. Sift through it thoughtfully, and then… let the stuff that you can’t use… drain right on out the bottom. Beekeepers are influenced to keep their bees based on many different factors - most importantly by what the focus of their beekeeping is - honey, pollination, healthy bees… you name it. So bear that in mind as you peruse the internet - which is a wonderful source of information, and….

it is a VERY big place!!!

The internet is a very big place! Or… sorting through it all - Part I

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Since I got interested in beekeeping, waaaaay back in 2007, and went to “bee school”, as you do, the whole world has sort of exploded with an AMAZING amount of beekeeping information.

The internet being what it is, and especially with YouTube being so accessible and easy to publish on (maybe too easy!) - you can now search the internet for just about anything and get a ton of bee-related information! Some of it is great, and some of it… well not so much. You might even find you’ve got way more information than you can digest in an entire lifetime! Eventually you come to realize that there are some folks with some really good things to say, and that some of those same folks are also really good at saying it. The websites and blogs and YouTube videos that those folks create and make available to everyone are wonderful good resources, and we’ve come to appreciate some of them a LOT, and we’d like to share them with you.

This list is in order more or less chronologically - in other words, in (almost) the order I discovered these sources, so it creates a sketch of how Gold Star Honeybees came to be what it is as well.

I began by going to “bee school”, as you do, by attending the classes that the Knox-Lincoln County Beekeepers Association held at the Knox-Lincoln County Cooperative Extension office, in 2007. I am grateful to Al Maloney who was the webmaster for the KLCB at that time and hooked me up with the start date of that class, to Jean Vose and her husband Dick, who organized that bee school for many many years and still like to brag that KLCB was my “alma mater”, and to Tony Jadczak, our State Apiarist here in Maine, who continues to march forward and does an awful lot with not very many resources (Maine is very big place too!).

But I found Langstroth hives and conventional methods a bit disconcerting. Something didn’t strike me as quite right about all this “help” that the bees seemed be getting. Hadn’t somebody told me that bees had been around for literally MILLIONS of years? And we’ve only been here for a couple hundred thousand. There seemed to be a disconnect there. Obviously bees must have been pretty capable of survival before we showed up to save them.

So I kept sort of idly digging around, and pretty soon I hit paydirt.

First - www.biobees.com. After Googling for about 4 months in early 2007 and somehow coming up empty, all of a sudden, there on my screen - was this English guy’s website. With a free document available for download called “How to Build Your Own Top Bar Hive”. I imagine that everybody in the world knows about Phil Chandler by now - he keeps a Flag Counter on his website showing the flags of all the countries of all the people who have visited his site. And there are so many flags on that counter page now - flags of countries whose names I can’t even pronounce, much less could I say where they are - he is truly an international source for beekeepers. Phil also runs the Natural Beekeeping Forum - which you can join, and share information with beekeepers the world over. One of the things in my short beekeeping career that I am most proud of was that I got to meet Phil on a trip I made through the UK in 2008/2009, and I thank him for that, and as well for the Podcast interview he did with me back in August 2010, which can be found here. Phil probably has more to do with the existence of Gold Star Honeybees than I could ever accurately convey to him. Thank you Phil!

Second there was Michael Bush. He’s at www.bushfarms.com/bees.htm Now I don’t know about you, but sometimes, if I really want to keep track of something I found on the internet, the only effective method is to print it out. I don’t always like to do that, since it’s not the greenest method of keeping track of things, but when it came to Michael’s website, I chose to do it anyway. By the time I was done, it represented quite an investment in paper and printer ink - not to mention a special trip to the store for a three-inch, three-ring binder to keep it in. Huge. History, math, opinion, tips and tricks, pictures, explanations… Michael is a very pragmatic sort of beekeeper and is frequently bemused by how difficult people sometimes seem to want to make beekeeping. A tag line on his website says: Everything works if you let it. I’ve also seen a presentation he’s done titled, quite frankly, “Lazy Beekeeping”. It really hits the nail on the head - it doesn’t make any sense to make things more complicated than they are - yet us humans, (with our big brains, and our opposable thumbs) sometimes seem to do just that and for no good reason. Michael clears up a lot of that silliness and has clear and practical answers to a lot of the questions that come up in the world of natural beekeeping - never mind the type of equipment you are using. I am pleased to say that I know Michael as well and he has devoted a significant chunk of time to clarifying some of my juvenile questions over the past few years. I’m also proud that Michael has a Gold Star top bar hive running in Nebraska and reports that it is doing well, and that the Gold Star top bar design works really well!

Another name that came up early on for me was Marty Hardison. Marty doesn’t keep up much of a website presence, but he’s currently out in Denver, CO keeping bees in places like Delaney Farms - part of DUG - the Denver Urban Gardens system. In 2010, Denver Urban Gardens celebrated the groundbreaking of their 100th community garden - and in a city that recently legalized beekeeping. Go Denver! Marty has a Gold Star hive out at Delaney Farm and they have been doing great.

Some other significant names that I fell across early on include:

Dee Lusby. Dee runs the Organic Beekeeping Yahoo Group. At last count, there were almost 4000 people on that list! With over 88,000 posts, you can bet the answer to your question has probably been posted there. Michael Bush is on that list a lot as well, so you get some great input from some very experienced beekeepers!

Dennis Murrell writes a Word Press blog called Bee Natural. And that’s a guy up against some very harsh weather - located in Wyoming, Dennis was blogging about 5 to 15 degrees F BELOW ZERO on Thanksgiving. Lots to say and loads of experience.

Jim Satterfield used to keep a great site, with a long list of good info here: http://www2.gsu.edu/~biojdsx/main.htm. When I spoke with him to ask to be made a part of it, he said that he didn’t maintain it anymore, and in fact at this writing, it appears to be gone altogether. The Northwest Arkansas Beekeepers website has a top bar link that closely resembles it but if anybody’s got a mirror copy, it would great to know about it. NWA’s site is here: https://sites.google.com/a/nwabeekeepers.com/www/

Along the way I devoured a copy of Gunther Hauk’s book “Toward Saving the Honeybee”. Gunther is a biodynamic beekeeper, who’s moved on from the Pfeiffer Center in New York to Spikenard Farm in Illinois, and from thence to a new location in Virginia.

Then there’s Sam Comfort. A self-proclaimed “wing nut” with an anarcharist’s attitude. We first met at a North East Treatment Free Beekeeping Conference in Leominster, Mass. And if you’ve ever heard him play the ukelele, then you understand why he’s so well-loved. There’s a video of that very phenomenon on our YouTube channel.

Now, with all this said, it turns out I still have more to say. So let’s take a break - we’ll call this Part I and you stay tuned for Part II - coming soon!