Hive Space

I recently interviewed Phil Chandler, who runs the biobees.com website, and who identifies himself as a Natural Beekeeper. Natural beekeepers are unlike those that they label as 'Conventional Beekeepers' in many ways, but the overarching definition is that there is less control, or interference, in and over the life of the honey bee, hence 'natural' beekeeping. The source of the argument (and if you spend any amount of time on the popular beekeeping forums, argument is the nicest word for it...things get heated on there) is the hive itself.

Most hives in this country are of the 'WBC' style. They use a space at the bottom for the queen to lay her eggs and for her helpers to tend the brood. The queen is seperated from the rest of the hive by mesh, a 'queen excluder', which prevents her accessing the other levels of the hive, and thereby using any more cells to lay brood. The cells are therefore exclusively available for honey production, and honey is made and stored here by the army of worker bees. To ensure that the workers do not expend any valuable honey-making energy on the construction of wax combs, 'foundation', sheets in the shape of honey comb, are fitted by the beekeeper.

                    Image from countryactivities.co.uk

This is the most common set-up that we have, but quite clearly, there is very little that's 'natural' about it. It has man-made written all over it. Natural Beekeepers do not prevent the queen accessing the rest of her hive and do not use foundation for the bees to work from, preferring to use the 'top-bar' hive model (plans available free on biobees.com), which provides thin bars for the bees to begin to construct their comb on, in whatever shape or direction takes their fancy. Less efficient for honey production, but closer to the way that apis mellifera would work in the wild, where pre-fab comb just isn't on offer.

I asked Phil about the differences between conventional and natural beekeepers.

Thank you for using the term 'conventional'. A lot of people start off using the word 'traditional', well, I think it's wrong  to use the word 'traditional' about a system of beekeeping that's been around for fifty years, so I prefer to use the word 'conventional' to distinguish between the beekeeper for whom the priority is honey yield, as opposed to what we have come to call the 'natural beekeeper', whose priority is pretty much more about the health of bees, and curiosity about bees in general, I suppose. We're much more inclined towards bee conservation, bee observation, and learning about bees - their behaviour - than we are about producing the maximum amount of honey.

                                                                                                                        Image from cornwallhoney.com

There's a saying that if you ask three beekeepers a question you'll get four differing opinions back. I interviewed a beekeeper named Martin yesterday, who has been experimenting with polyurethane hives, which provide far greater insluation, and so better thermodynamics. Martin considers all wooden hives - both WBC and Top Bar are included in this - to be cruel to bees. He bases this on the fact that bees in the wild build their nests in the thick of tree trunks, which have very different heat-retention features to a 17mm piece of wood. Martin's bees don't need to cluster together for warmth during the winter, the way that other people's bees do. Instead, they're kept at a balmy 17 degrees Celsius, even around the peripheries of their hive.

A hive is a battleground. The queen slays all pretenders to her throne with her scythe-shaped sting and the workers starve and bite to death the lazy drones at the beginning of winter, when they can no longer afford the honey to keep freeloaders alive. The hive is a battleground for beekeepers too, who use the space as a testing field for their theories and experiments, pressuring the bees to produce as much honey as possible, or contriving to produce the healthiest pollinators. If a colony of bees is a little civilisation, then the beekeeper is their omniscient god.