🐝 Beekeeping For Everyone! - #8 - There is Nothing Natural About B...

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When I teach an introduction to beekeeping course there comes a time, a few hours into it, after we discuss the honeybee castes and different breeds of bees, that I ask the questions, "Who wants to keep bees naturally?". Inevitably most hands in the class go up, if not all. It is then that I am the 'bad guy' and burst their bubble. There is nothing natural about beekeeping!

nat·u·ral

/naCH(ə)rəl/
adjective
existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind.

What is natural for bees?

In nature bees live in an empty cavity of a hollow tree, which is very dissimilar to a manmade beehive.

A bee tree is never opened up and exposed to light. It never has the hive scent diminished by massive air changes. It never has drastic brood nest temperature changes. The bees build and orient the comb in the fashion they see fit. It never has it's combs reversed. It is well grounded and often located on an earth magnetic line. It is superbly insulated compares to beehives. It is in the shade of the tree canopy in the summer and in the sun during the winter. It usually has just one entrance and no ventilation. They manage their nest in an unobstructed vertical manner.

I know some of these differences seem very esoteric, but does that mean they aren't important? Remember post #1, be a critical thinker. I often tell folks that I owe a lot to a few beekeepers, that I have deep respect for, who helped me become the beekeeper that I am. But in the same breathe I also tell them that feral honeybees are my mentor. I have been studying them for decades and they have the most influence on my beekeeping.

The biggest battle I usually encounter is with ventilation. Beekeepers seem to be fully bought into the "Cold doesn't kill bees, moisture does" mantra that has become a commandment for beekeepers. For some reason beekeepers feel the only way to deal with condensation is to ventilate. None of my hives have any ventilation other than a bottom entrance and I have no moisture issues. Why is that? I provide my bees with an environment that allows them to keep warm, just like a bee tree. Warm air can hold much more water than cold air. My bees also consume about 1/3 the amount of honey during winter as other local traditional beekeepers' bees. Honey is the fuel that keeps them warm. I will save the details on hive thermodynamics and some of the esoteric differences for future posts.

The other thing that is mind boggling to me is the beekeepers that believe horizontal top bar hives are "more natural". I often think they confuse primitive with natural. These primitive hives were developed in poor countries with limited resources, and fortunately for them the climate is usually warm and they don't have to deal with cold winters. Horizontal configurations provide no benefit to the bees, only the beekeeper.

Bees live vertically

^source

Bees natural tendencies are to live and work in a vertical manner. They start at the top of the nest in the spring and as nectar is bought in and turn into honey it is stored at the top. This forces the queen down. As the spring and summer seasons continue and more stores come in the queen and brood nest is driven down. By fall, the brood nest and cluster of bees is at the bottom of the nest and all their winter stores are above them. As winter progresses they consume honey from the bottom and slowly work their way up the comb. Since heat rises, the heat given off by the cluster pre-heats the honey directly above them making it easier to consume. In this configuration, there are no obstructions between them and their next meal allowing them to continue consuming honey and keeping warm regardless of the outside temperature.

Contrary to this is the horizontal configuration that requires the cluster of bees to move to new cold comb when the honey on the current comb is exhausted. This requires the bees to break their cluster to move around the comb to the next. If the temperature is too cold the bees can not break cluster and will either starve to death of freeze if they do.

Flow Hive Hypocrisy

First of all, this is not a pitch for the Flow Hive. As an engineer I admire the ingenuity of the design and believe it does work in some situations. However, when dealing with nature things seldom go as plan and tend to complicate things. I was one of the earliest to get a set of frames, but I have never used them, nor plan to. I use them for my beekeeping classes. I do want to give praise the the Flow Hive team for the way they handled the overwhelming demand for their product. I believe their indiegogo campaign goal was around $70K USD, but then ended up being the all time biggest indiegogo campaign with over $13M USD. They did not have a team in place to handle such a crowd but quickly hired and trained people and did an outstanding job considering the situation.

I was amazed at the hatred towards this effort from the beekeeping community. Instead of being excited that beekeeping was getting attention, it was almost like they where jealous. Regardless if you believe in the product or not, it was not a scam by any means.

Some of the concerns where valid, but these were often shadowed by the vitriol and hatred of the "PRO Natural" beekeepers. The 'best' ones I heard where:

"it is cruel to the bees and enslaving them"
"creates greedy profiting beekeepers"
"interrupts the bond between bees and the beekeeper"

I'm not sure how it is any crueler or enslaving than conventional beekeeping. If you want to be a greedy profiting beekeeper you aren't going to spend the extra money for flow frames, they don't make the bee produce any more than traditional frames. Bond between bees and beekeepers? What bond? That natural bond of them being protected by tree walls from human intervention?

I would like to counter all these outrageous claims by saying the Flow Hive can actually mimics their "natural" environment more than traditional beekeeping. The hive doesn't have to be opened up, scent released, brood chilled, exposed to light,....... And honey can be harvest with minimal disturbances.

With all that said, there are valid personal preferences why some beekeepers would not use flow frames and I can respect that. But respect goes both ways!

I will close with my favorite quote from Michael Bush.
"Bees continue to survive despite our help".