Welcome to Sue and Mick's Natural Beekeeping blog.

Sue started beekeeping with our neighbour, Jim in this beautiful coastal village of Welcombe on the North Devon/Cornwall border. They both decided to start beekeeping in 2009 and began to attend apiary meetings of the Holsworthy Beekeepers Association. They signed up for the course they were running over the winter and started this, along with another neighbour, Richard, in January 2010.
It was a very good course, but they were all uncomfortable with some aspects of conventional beekeeping. They then came across Phil Chandler and his Barefoot Beekeeper book and website. This way of beekeeping uses Top Bar Hives which are the type used all over Africa, The Caribbean and many other places in the world. They predate the conventional hives that are used in most developed countries by hundreds of years. The bees build natural comb onto top bars and are managed with as little intervention as possible.
Sue and Jim realised that The Yarner Trust, in our own village, was running a Natural Beekeeping course, with Phil as tutor, in April 2010, what a coincidence ( or is it synchronicity? ). Anyway they both signed up and Yarner asked if they would be prepared to look after the bees for the courses and house them in Sue's field. Jim and Sue decided to say yes and the hunt was on for a nucleus of bees that would be ready in time for the course.
This was not an easy task. No one knew, at that stage, how their colonies had fared over the severe winter and most people had a long list of people already for their nucleii. Beekeeping has become very popular recently with many people realising that bees are in trouble and need our help. Also, as they learned more, they realised that there was a lot of prejudice amongst some conventional beekeepers against Top Bar Beekeeping. Oh dear 'politics', even in beekeeping! This, unfortunately, meant that some beekeepers said they wouldn't sell bees to go in a Top Bar Hive. They also needed a couple of hives to start the apiary off.
After a couple of months of phone calls and headaches Phil managed to source a nucleus of bees and Dave Baker, one of the Yarner Trustees, made 2 Top Bar Hives. So, they were off!
The weekend course with Phil went ahead and was great. Sue & Jim were now very 'green' beekeepers. They had quite a lot of problems over the first 2 months, mostly to do with the fact the bees were in conversion from 1/2 Dadant frames to Top Bars. They then got a second nucleus, which were on Top Bars already. These came from Heather Bell bees on the Lizard.
They began keeping a small book, with notes to each other, in the hive. It served as a record of everything they did and how the bees were doing. Unfortunately there was a leak in the roof of one of the hives and the book got wet. Hence the birth of this blog. They added all the notes from the book on here and have since used this as the record of the progress of the apiary.
In May 2013 Jim moved to Herefordshire and we agreed to change the name of the blog to Sue and Mick's Natural Beekeeping as, over the past year, Mick has become more and more interested in and involved with the bees.

Phil Chandler (The Barefoot Beekeeper) website which has links to UK courses and Phil's books etc:

Heather Bell bees - source of Top Bar nucleii although very expensive. It's probably better to try and catch a swarm locally:


Black Native Queens:


Varroa Mesh:
Flash band for hive roof:


Shellac flakes or buttons, they also sell thinner:


Shellac thinner for making up a shellac coating for the inside of a hive, they also sell shellac:


Good quality affordable suits and equipment:



Top Bar hive tools:



Top Bar Hives and Nucleus Boxes:

Paul Holdaway, in our village, makes the hives and nucleus boxes shown in our blog post of 24th March 2017 - the picture taken in the hall. His phone number is 01288 331252

Thursday, 13 March 2014

Spring 2014

I can't believe I haven't posted since last September. I fully intended to do a write up of our meeting with Phil on 6th October. Then we seemed to have a really busy October and went on to spend almost all of November with no phone or internet after a storm. By the time it was fixed we were well into the winter with the bees safely tucked up and Christmas imminent.
Anyway, it was a really good meeting with around 15 of us in the top room of The Old Smithy. Phil gave us a run down of his latest ideas and developments including, deep litter floors, varroa control, periscope entrances and bar widths. There were lots of questions and lively discussion. After the meeting many of us stayed on to eat there and the conversations about bees continued.

Our bees have fared incredibly well over the winter. There seemed to be an awful lot more bees than usual overwintering and we think the queen started laying soon after New Year. We checked their supplies in early February, thinking they might need some fondant, but were delighted to find they still had a lot of honey.
In the current good weather they are out flying and bringing in loads of pollen. We are planning to take some of their excess honey soon as we think they still have some left from their winter supplies. It will also give us the opportunity to get some of their 'creative' comb out and try to encourage them to build straighter combs. There was an interesting article in a magazine I saw recently that had some ideas on how to do this, which we might give a try.
We are anticipating they will be thinking about swarming early this year, so will be checking on them daily from early April for any signs.



This video was taken this morning 13th March 2014 and the thermometer is showing 23˚ in full sunlight!
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)