Bed Bug Life Cycle

When fire became portable, Man else discovered that smoke caused bees to become more amenable to robbing.

Some time later, a more settled tribe found that they could house bees in baskets or pots, which saved them the trouble of climbing trees to get the honey, and the craft of beekeeping was born. Pots, baskets and logs prolonged in use for many centuries, and while proficient beekeepers would have understood a good deal of the behaviour of their charges, the inner secrets of the hive remained ended from observers until the end of the 18th century, when a blind Swiss by the name of François Huber found them out through the medium of his careful - and sighted - servant, Burnens. Huber's New Observations on the Natural History of Bees remains a first-rate to this day.

Some 30 years later, Jan Dzieraon developed Huber's experimental hive additional to originate the first truly practical, movable-frame beehive, and shortly afterwards in 1852, Rev. Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth publicized and patented his own version. Such was his talent for publicity and marketing that the 'Langstroth' became and remains the suitable hive in the Usa and the model upon which most other variants are based.

However, this type of hive is costly to buy, very difficult for amateur woodworkers to build - due to the precise dimensions and many small parts needed for frames - requires constant maintenance, causes great disturbance to the lives of bees, and is heavy and cumbersome in use. Many women, especially, have been put off beekeeping by the weight-lifting needed to harvest honey from a Langstroth-type hive, and hernias are commonplace among commercial beekeepers.

In Nepal, honey-hunting is still practised by men descending cliffs on ropes and using long poles to dislodge chunks of comb. Elsewhere, bees are kept in skeps, baskets, pots, cavities in walls and other packaging devised from local materials and - we can deduce from their longevity - more-or-less convenient both for bees and for their keepers. In Africa, probably the original home of the honeybee, the top bar hive was developed as an 'intermediate technology' solution, capable of being constructed using local skills and materials and being, in essence, a beekeeper-friendly hollow log, having the advantages of movable combs but without the need for machine-made parts.

Whatever the room we offer them, our meetings with bees have always been a process of negotiation, albeit somewhat one-sided. We can safe ourselves from them, but they ultimately have no security from us. The encroachment of chemical agriculture, deforestation and urbanization have reduced their natural habitat, while toxic cocktails of insecticides have poisoned their flowers.

The honeybee has come to be seen as the 'canary in the coal mine' of our civilization and she is showing early warning signs of her imminent demise, to which we must pay urgent attention.

Our challenge now is to re-negotiate our association with bees: we must learn to safe and raise them, rather than simply exploit them, and we need to learn to listen to what they need from us. The process of discovering how we can most effectively do that is the project that myself and others have set ourselves, and we hope that many more will join us and carry this work forward.

We reply the paradox possible in the phrase 'natural beekeeping': as soon as we consider 'keeping' bees, we begin to stray from what is truly 'natural'. In nature, only bees keep bees.

To be carefully 'natural', our beekeeping practice must take into account:

• the natural impulses and behaviour of bees, including - foraging, swarming, storing food and defending their nest
• how hive develop affects bees
• the suitability of materials used in hive construction, including considerations of sustainability
• the nature and frequency of our interventions
• the impact of a localized increase in honeybee people on other species of pollinators
• the balance between honey harvesting and the bees' own needs
• the nature of any added inputs - medications, feeding

We are engaged in a process of working towards the ultimately unattainable plan of wholly 'natural' beekeeping, while acknowledging that the bees will go their own way regardless of our wishes. Our association with them is that of facilitator or minder rather than 'keeper'. We could say that the role of the natural beekeeper is to enable our bees to attain the fullest possible expression of their bee-ness while in our care.

Our allembracing goal in natural beekeeping is to accomplish a state of sustainability: balancing inputs and outputs such that our activities improve rather than damage the condition of our bees, other species and the planet.

To be truly sustainable, a theory must be as close to carbon-neutral as it can be, requiring no artificial inputs and having no detrimental impact on the natural environment. So if we are to continue to have a association with honeybees, we have to consider what impact current beekeeping practices have and how our 'natural' arrival seeks to improve on this state of affairs.

A typical commercial beekeeping carrying out is a real vigor hog. Lumber - which may or may not come from sustainable sources - is sliced and milled by powered machinery prior to assembly into hive boxes, which are movable by road, sea or rail to be additional distributed by road to their apiary sites. Regular visits by beekeepers require oil-derived fuel, and more is needed to fire the boilers to heat the vital quantities of water needed for sterilizing woodwork and washing down de-cappers, extractors, tanks and floors. More power is needed to retrieve the crop, to passage it and to mix and distribute the sugar syrup needed for the bees' survival following the discharge of their stores. Honey must then be filtered, bottled and distributed to wholesalers and thence to retail outlets. Meanwhile, beeswax is recovered by means of steam or boiling water, cleaned and filtered and sent off to be re-melted and turned into sheets of foundation, which are then sold back to the beekeepers for insertion into frames for next season.

Migratory beekeepers in the Usa truck hives by the thousands clear over the country for the almond pollination, while in the Uk this type of action is nowadays largely restricted to taking hives up to the moors in August for the heather crop, and some orchard pollination work.

Due to what might be called the Langstroth hegemony, this whole scenario is also enacted in exiguous by amateur beekeepers, who largely mimic the activities of their commercial brethren. They may only have a few hives at the lowest of their gardens, but in most cases they have not carefully any alternative to the expensive, energy-hungry tool available from the slick catalogues of the beekeepers' suppliers.

We know that bees need nothing much more than a dry, ventilated cavity in which to build their nest. Instead, 'modern' beekeepers insist on supplying them with a box full of wooden frames, in which are mounted sheets of wax, helpfully imprinted with oversized 'worker-bee' hexagonal cell bases. A newly-hived swarm of bees must be surprised for real to find so much done for them: ready-made comb bases hung in neat rows, with spaces all around them for passage - what a boon for a busy colony!

But what may at first sight appear to be a great convenience, also has some vital drawbacks. All these imprinted cells are the same size, yet whatever who has observed natural comb knows that cell sizes vary considerably, and not just between workers and drones: worker cells themselves vary in diameter agreeing to rules only bees are aware of. All those dead-straight frames may look neat, but bees don't build dead-straight comb - they like a gentle curve here and there. And if you watch bees building natural comb in an unrestricted space, they hang in chains, legs linked, as if laying out the dimensions of the comb in space as they work above their own heads - something they cannot do on foundation.

So a good deal of so-called 'modern' beekeeping - in fact, virtually unchanged since the mid-19th century - is unsustainable from our point of view, as well as being a nuisance to bees. In terms of honey yield, it is clearly an revising on logs and skeps, but in terms of bee condition and vigor efficiency, it has turned out to be a disaster.

The job of the natural beekeeper is to find ways of interacting with bees that are truly sustainable, both for the bees themselves and for the planet.

In The Barefoot Beekeeper, I proposed the following three, simple theory for the 'natural' beekeeper to consider:

1. Interference in the natural lives of the bees is kept to a minimum.
2. Nothing is put into the hive that is known to be, or likely to be harmful whether to the bees, to us or to the wider environment and nothing is taken out that the bees cannot afford to lose.
3. The bees know what they are doing: our job is to listen to them and furnish the optimum conditions for their well-being, both inside and outside the hive.

These theory seem to me to form a solid foundation for our mental about how we arrival bees and beekeeping. As soon as we step beyond those basic theory and attempt additional to define the parameters, we find ourselves in danger of starting to originate a 'book of rules'. And it doesn't take much looking around the world today to see how divisive and destructive other 'books of rules' have been.

'Natural', 'balanced' or 'sustainable' beekeeping - whatever name we give it - is a process, not a destination. We have to remain flexible and always be on the lookout for ways to improve our techniques, so all things in this book is offered in this spirit: indications of what seems to work, always with the possibility that there are even great ways yet to be discovered, or - more likely - re-discovered, as there is for real nothing new in beekeeping.

Historically, we began our association with bees when somebody discovered that the taste of honey was worth the pain it cost to harvest. We became honey-hunters, and while there were few of us and many of them, this was sustainable.

When somebody discovered that it was possible to offer shelter to honeybees while they made their honey, and then kill them off to raid their stores, we became bee keepers, and while there were few bee keepers and many honeybees, that too was sustainable.

Then Man invented a way to house bees that did not require them to be killed, but instead allowed people to administrate and operate them to some extent, arranging things so as to trick them into producing more honey for their masters than for themselves, and we became bee farmers. And that was sustainable for a while because there were still many of them and although there were also many of us, we could manipulate their pregnancy so as to make more of them as we needed.

Now it has become clear that we have gone too far, for bees have begun to suffer from diseases that were virtually unknown in the old days, and they have to be given medicines in order to keep them alive. And because a whole business has grown up around the farming of these bees, and there is a lot of money at stake, beekeepers have been slow to change their ways and many could not do so for fear of bankruptcy, and so the condition of the honeybees has become worse and they are subject to parasites and viruses that never troubled them in the past.

Meanwhile, we forgot how to grow food in the way that we once had done because we were no longer inclined to labour in the fields, and instead devised clever ways to make the soil retain more crops. We poured fertilizers onto our fields and killed off inconvenient creatures with 'pesticides' - defining a whole class of living organisms as our enemies and therefore dispensable. This was never sustainable, and never can be.

And that is where we find ourselves today, and this is the problem we face: bees have become weakened through exploitation and a toxic agricultural system, allied to the impossible expectation of continuous economic growth.

As 'natural beekeepers', our most pressing work is to restore bees to their original, wholesome state. We think of ourselves as 'keepers' in the sense of 'nurturing and supporting' rather than 'enslaving'. We must seek to safe and conserve the honeybee by working within their natural capacity, not permanently urging them towards ever greater production. We must challenge the whole agricultural and economic theory that has caused us to arrive at this point, because without change at that level, the future for both us and the bees is bleak.

We can make a start by re-establishing more natural, non-violent ways of working with bees: neither we nor they have any need of routine or preventative 'treatments' with artificial antibiotics, fungicides or miticides. We don't need to operate 'honey factories' - we can article ourselves with providing room for bees in return for whatever they can afford to give us. In some years, this may be nothing at all, while in others there may be an abundant harvest.

Such is nature: bees depend on honey for their survival; we do not.

If the price of returning bees to a state of natural, robust condition is a exiguous less honey on our toast, is it not a worthwhile sacrifice?