The bees are building!

Yay! After weeks of peeking in on them, only to see them clustered up like I'd brought them to the coldest, wettest place on earth, lo and behold what did I see the other day but beautiful homemade honeycomb! Most beekeepers use frames that already have comb but to avoid pesticide residue and some other issues I wanted to let my bees produce their own, and they've been busy...

Click on the picture to see it larger... They have five full-size combs going here and a sixth started, and they're loving the sun today. This is looking in the window of my African Top Bar Hive, you can see the entrance holes to the bottom left on the other side of the hive. 

The buzzing of bees (in my head)...

Any guesses what this is?

I really had no idea how much of a world beekeeping is, populated with many new enthusiasts, a few old beekeepers, many conflicting theories, burgeoning new research... Knowing that CCD has demolished most feral bees and many hobby and commercial hives and in keeping with the permaculture philosophy of a sustainable homestead, I want to keep bees for pollination and some honey. After sitting through a local beekeeper's meeting, talking with a couple of family friends with varying views of conventional beekeeping with Langstroth hives, and reading oh-so-many blogs and forums about bees, there is about an entire hive buzzing in my head...

A few interesting things about bees:

• A busy summer hive can have as many as 60,000 bees
• A hive will only have a few hundred male 'drone' bees, and they get kicked out of the hive in autumn, no dead weight to drag the hive down in the winter
• Hives used to survive basically on their own, my friend's hive producing 160lbs of surplus honey each summer
• Bee hives now have to be nursed along, many producing only 20-40lbs of surplus honey and many dying in the winter.

Anyway, we'll see what I've decided after my beginning beekeeping class tomorrow, but I'm thinking now that I will go with an alternative hive setup, the top bar hive, originally from Greece and used in many developing countries because of their low cost and self-containment. The benefits of this hive over conventional Langstroth hives is they allow for a more organic experience for the bees (no drugs or medicinal treatments), they don't require storage of the many boxes and extra tools required for the life cycle of bees in Langstroth hives, and they allow bees to more naturally create their own combs. Hopefully they will lead a life less stressed by chemicals and pesticides, pests, and disruption than those in conventional hives. They do require more regular intervention from the beekeeper in keeping the free-hanging combs straight and don't usually produce as much honey. If you're interested in this, check out these links: http://www.biobees.com/ and www.bushfarms.com/bees.htm. So, we'll see how it all works out, stay tuned for pics of me hiving bees for the first time in April!