Learning about bee keeping

Im not entirely sure where the initial spark came from but I just could not get the idea of keeping bees out of my mind. I read every book I could and decide to give it a go.

Being a vegan for the last few years maybe me question the ethics of bee keeping quite a lot. I will write in length about my Vegan lifestyle choice but for those unaware beekeeping and consuming honey are not considered vegan whatsoever but after a lot of education and thought I don’t agree. I think you can keep bees in a natural way that can create a mutually benefitial relation between humans and bees.

Nature is harsh, and bees sometimes don’t have good homes and are under constant threat of both pesticides and the varroa mite. That mite is the main cause of hive collapse that everyone has been talking about over the last few years. So my first point is that bee keeping is good for the bees, you are giving them a safe reliable home that you look in to and make sure there is a queen and plenty of food for the bees to eat. Small bee keepers want to make sure their bees have the best lives possible, rather than to completely exploit them for financial gain like most of animal agriculture does. That alone was enough to sway me.

But what about arguments how the Langstroth hive disrupts the bees from making their own natural hives? I kinda agree so i decide to use the more natural Waree’ hive method, where you dont use the same pre built frames and you largely leave bees to their own devices. So that’s what I’m experimenting with this year with my first hive.

The third argument was about honey, is it ethical to eat the food bees save to survive the winter? I say as long as you don’t harm the bees when you harvest it and you make sure they have more then enough supplies to comfortably make it through the winter I don’t see a single problem with charging a small rent payment to the bees for giving them such a good home and checking in on them from time to time. Now I would agree that commercial bee keeping can look at things more from a “how much honey can we get” perspective rather then “how can we take care of these bees” prespective, but even then no bees no honey. So the bees need to be well tended to get the crop you are after.

My biggest mistake so far is I didn’t start with two hives to test things in one and not the other to see what works best. But what I did is buy a small kit online and put it together. I modified it slightly to be a more Waree’ like hive and bought my first bees from a local supplier.

Bees how I got them.

I got my bees early April and put them in my car and just drove them home. It’s amazing how normal it was, just to put a bunch of bees in my car. I watch a few videos about how to move them to the hive and it seemed to work ok. But I noticed a few issues once they were in there. They had no food at all and it was freezing at night. My understand as a total beginner is that bees vibrate to stay warm and use honey to keep their metabolisms going. So no honey, no warmth = dead bees. So I put a space heater near the hive and dripped some honey down the sides of the hive. I wasn’t really sure how to handle this situation as I was sure the cold would kill them off and sure enough quite a few of them didn’t make it, but a bunch did. I left the space heater in place until the nights didn’t freeze and checked on my bees everyday and sure enough they were building a hive and getting settles, the planed seemed to be working and now by mid June it’s thriving, im going to add two more boxes and just let them grow, all while mostly just leaving them alone.

How it looks now after adding a few more boxes.