Here’s another bee-autific little blurb in our series of bee-attitudes in need of recalibrating - this is BEE-ATTITUDE #3:
“Top bar hives don’t overwinter in cold climates.” This one appears to have originated with an early philanthropic effort to provide some folks in Kenya with some supplemental income. Sort of a “stimulus package”, if you will. They used horizontal hives made from local materials - and that used no frames or wax foundation - in Kenya - where the temperature ranges from 45 to 99 degrees Fahrenheit. I don’t know about you but I’ve been a number of places a lot closer to home, where temperatures could exceed those numbers on both ends, and people are keeping bees in those places in top bar hives, successfully - and I didn’t have to go to Kenya to see that.
I accumulate a lot of data about top bar hives and how they behave in the various locations where people are keeping them, and the growing list of people who are successfully keeping bees in top bar hives in places where the temperatures range from 5 to 99 degrees F is getting pretty long. So we’re not sure that a top bar hive is only suitable for Kenya’s temperatures…
And we hate to point this out, but logic insists that we must: It would seem, if you were to ask a whole bunch of conventional beekeepers, that bees don’t overwinter in Langstroth hives very well either… or maybe it’s that bees just don’t overwinter well, period. I know too many Langstroth equipment users that lost all of their colonies over a winter, whether a vicious or a mild winter, for it to make sense to say that it can be blamed on the equipment being used. I think that healthier bees overwinter better - and so that’s our focus.
Gold Star Honeybees is also excited to have provided equipment to the Kearsarge Beekeepers group in New Hampshire this season (2010) - This group is studying and documenting the health and behavior of 36 Gold Star Top Bar Hives in New England, USA. So more data will be coming soon - Watch this Space!

Does this attitude match up with yours? Check us out at www.goldstarhoneybees.com. We’ve been looking for you - we need your help in saving the bees.

Here’s another bee-autific little blurb in our series of bee-attitudes in need of recalibrating - this is BEE-ATTITUDE #2:
Sheets of wax foundation are provided to give bees a “head start”. Someone should explain this truth to the bees. Early in my beekeeping career I was astonished to find that when I asked a panel of beekeepers at an “Ask the Beekeeper” session of Bee School just what bees did before we gave them these sheets of wax foundation - that no one really seemed to have a good answer to this one. Since then, as a top bar beekeeper, I have learned a bit about natural wax and I have to wonder — giving bees a head start on what, I wonder?
Here’s a little anecdote about wax building: A top bar beekeeper, worried that perhaps having melted beeswax on the points of his bevelled top bars still wasn’t quite enough encouragement for his bees to live in his new Gold Star Top Bar Hive, added a top bar that he had modified to hold a sheet of wax foundation, cut to fit into his new top bar hive. Nine bars of freshly drawn natural wax later - they still had not touched the bar with the foundation installed in it.
At the very least, really, we ought to rename the stuff - since if you pay attention to how bees make wax - you’ll notice right away that bees don’t build from the ground up - they generally hang from something and build down. Occasionally, they even start at one wall and build sideways…

Does this attitude match up with yours? Check us out at www.goldstarhoneybees.com. We’ve been looking for you - we need your help in saving the bees.

There’s an interesting phenomenon that seems to occur in the beekeeping world… maybe you’ve noticed it too. We call it The Theory of Immutable Truths. It’s the theory that says that any statement that is repeated oft’ enough becomes true. It doesn’t necessarily have to be logical, you just have to say it lots and lots of times. And since beekeepers like to tell their stories over and over, there are a lot of “truths” that have attained that status in the 157 years since the invention and patent of the Langstroth hive in 1853.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be posting a couple of these supposedly immutable truths that we personally have seen honeybees “give the lie to”. Here are the most prominent “truths” that a novice beekeeper may encounter early in their new found endeavors:

BEE-ATTITUDE #1
Bees must go “up”. This one appealed to me when I first heard it because it seemed to simplify things. If bees must go up, then all I need to do is keep stacking up boxes in a tower, and the sky would be the limit! Then I got one of those phone calls that I plainly should have allowed to go to voice mail -> someone had bees in a building. In a house, specifically. In the roofline of a house, to be exact. Did I want them? I said yes I did, and so I fetched my bee jacket and gathered up what tools I expected to find useful, and off I went to relocate some errant honey bees. What did I find when I got there? You guessed it. Bees that were going (gasp) sideways. Sideways for a long ways, in fact. That call was the first in a long line of phone calls received by what has since become a thriving department of Gold Star Honeybees - the Live Bee Relocation Department.
Now I don’t know about you but I know that humans have a tendency to get some things backwards. This would appear to be one of them. When the Reverend Lorenzo Loraine Langstroth created his moveable frame Langstroth beehive - using the logic of three-eights of an inch of bee space and a box he had hanging around in his garage - he created something else as well. What, you ask? He created the beginnings of an immutable truth! We began to use a beehive that only allowed bees to go up, and the truth that sprung forth from this was “Bees must go up!”
Since that early phone call I’ve relocated a lot of bees from various situations in buildings. And I’ve seen situations where bees occupied large branches of trees - that reached out horizontally from the vertical tree trunk. The thing to know is that bees are “cavity nesters.” They need to build their homes inside a cavity, or an empty space. And they accommodate themselves to the cavity they have chosen. If that cavity goes up, then so do the bees. If that cavity goes sideways, well… you can see where that’s going, I bet.

Now doesn’t that make more sense?

Does this attitude match up with yours? Check us out at www.goldstarhoneybees.com. We’ve been looking for you - we need your help in saving the bees.

“A swarm in May -
is worth a bale of hay.
A swarm in June -
is worth a silver spoon.
A swarm in July -
isn’t worth a fly.”

Why is this old adage so often repeated?

Because it tells us a bit about honeybees and their needs. A swarm is the honeybees’ method of reproducing. In a swarm, the entire colony organizes itself so that the “old” queen - the one who flies off to find a new home - takes with her the right number of nurse bees and house bees and worker bees and drones, and leaves behind not only all the honey comb the colony has built, but also all of their existing stores of food, and brood - the “unborn babies” - ensuring that the colony who stays behind can raise their new queen, and she can take her mating flight, and their life can begin again.

In May the colony is likely a bit ahead of itself - a bit small to build up quickly, a bit early in the season for the nectar flow.

In June, things are just right - swarms are larger, nectar and pollen are everywhere, and when they find a place to begin their new colony - they go “gangbusters”!

In July, things are a little bit past prime. The nectar flow has been in full swing for awhile now, and most colonies are already built up to maximum size and strength. A swarm in July may or may not have time to bring in the food stores, and raise the brood they will need to survive the winter.

Does this attitude match up with yours? Check us out at www.goldstarhoneybees.com. We’ve been looking for you - we need your help in saving the bees.

Greetings!

If you are one of the growing number of people who are concerned about what is happening to honey bees - then you are one of our heroes!

This blog is a place where we will focus on one really important thing - something that matters to each of us individually and to the planet as a whole:

… healthy honey bees…

Natural beeswax honeycomb

At Gold Star Honeybees, we believe that what you focus on, increases.

So we put a lot of our energy into focusing on what we want more of

- healthy honey bees -

and not so much energy into focusing on the things that we don’t want at all…

Join the Top-Bar-Beekeepers-Meetup-Group

to become a part of an expanding group of people keeping bees naturally.

Visit www.goldstarhoneybees.com to get the gist of what we do and the products that we sell.

Thanks for visiting!

- Christy Hemenway, founder

GOLD STAR HONEYBEES

Bath, Maine, USA

207-449-1121