This blogsite has been a little quiet recently because contributors have been beavering away on various projects bearing fruit elsewhere.
Andrew has written a book!
Beekeeping Simplified with the Drayton Hive is available from Northern Bee Books
The Drayton Hive is a sophisticated design using conventional, deep frames in a super-insulated horizontal hive. It was designed by Andrew, who has written this website describing it.
Here’s another, much more modest winter project: I wrote an article called Insights from natural beekeeping for the British Bee Vets‘ November newsletter. I think the editor had a bit of fun as he placed it just after an article stressing why you absolutely must treat for varroa. That’ll make ’em think.
It’s great that they are willing to discuss natural beekeeping openly. Vets, of course, see animals in a wide variety of settings and are well aware that ones in low stress natural environments experience lower levels of disease than intensively farmed ones, so I think they’ll have open minds to the idea of simply enabling varroa resistance by not “helping”.
In some countries bee vets have a formal role in bee husbandry, enshrined in legislation, but in Britain such functions tend to be done by bee inspectors. Nevertheless a group of interested British vets formed a group in 2015. With their broad and varied experience, I hope we can learn from them.
More news on other projects as they come to fruition.
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