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We've ordered a good beginning beekeeper book and we are learning what we can through blogs (Hey, Warren!) and books and online information before approaching someone here locally to mentor us when we start our first hives.
Bees can be so exciting! Watching honeybees busily glutting on goldenrod and purple loosestrife out at the farm is something I think I could really do for hours...it makes me so happy to see them with plentiful nectar forage, zooming here and there and feasting.
We met a nearby landowner who has hives and who I know will give us the benefit of his expertise in the event we get some of our own hives...hooray!!
I'm writing this short post in order to have a link to alternative hives I haven't heard that much about, and so I can find the links faster.
The two I find very interesting right now are the Tim Rowe Rose hives and the Oscar Perone hives. I have a book about the Rose hives and I am really interested in his system and finding anyone who has tried them.
Here are a few videos introducing this method:
First Rose Hive video
Second Rose Hive video
Third Rose Hive video
I am also interested in knowing more about the Perone hive, which mimics a hollow log concept, some parts of which are not designed to be removable. They say it is designed to have a really large population of bees and takes 2 or 3 years before being fully established enough to have excess honey for human harvest. Nicole at The Pantry Book built an observation Perone hive and I'm following her experiment with great interest: PERONE HIVE LINK
There's also a youtube video that goes into some detail about its design and operation.
OK, that's it...just wanted to have these links pinned here for convenience. If you keep bees, I'd love to learn from any advice you would like to share!
8 comments:
Go to Root Simple on my blog roll.
OK, I checked it out...what were you wanting me to see specifically? I saw one article about how an article was written about how there are too many beekeepers in London. Was that it? :)
Top Bar Hives are both bee and bee guardian friendly. You can learn from the best by going to backyardhive.com
Corwin is a fabulous teacher, I highly recommend attending one of his seminars if you can.
Julie
Finding a local mentor is the best...watching someone keep bees, even if for just a few hours will put you leaps ahead of going it alone!
Anonymous, thank you for the link!
Warren, we're sure going to try to find one :)
Robbyn,]
They have quite a few articles and links about bees and bee hives and health. The article was not really about too many beekeepers. It was more on the line of too many beekeepers for flowers available. If I remember, the gist was that bees need blossoms, so an overabundance of bees and lack of flowers was not a good idea. Do a search for bee on Root Simple or look up backwardbeekeepers.
Parsimony, thanks! I'll do it. As reluctant as I was to move from TN to Florida, one thing I CAN say about the location of our land is that it's totally in the boondocks, with literally hundreds of fruit tree groves one direction, a swamp another, and a huge Preserve elsewhere. It's a year-round bee Heaven, with the only exception being monsoon months that can't be anticipated. We weren't thinking bees when we bought the property, but I've been paying attention to the plants in that area in the year since we got it and it seems there's always something there since there's not much of a winter. Let's see...I'll certainly enjoy the links, thanks so much!
I found topbar hives were a great way to start out and we are planning to try a Perone hive next year. I recommend biobees.com (natural beekeeping forum) or beesource.com. Natural beekeeping has a different approach to conventional. Best of luck,
Kim
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