Another step towards becoming a keeper of the bees. Walter Kohler-Bond held a one day natural bee keeping course at Mulloon Creek Natural Farms. It was a beautiful day. Walter is just lovely lovely lovely - a permaculture teacher from Moruya. The whole natural bee keeping thing (you know, no chemicals, no moving the hives around willy nilly, letting the hives replace their queen naturally, enabling the bees to become stronger, more resilient, cleverer and to express their full busy bee potential) attracts lots of gentle and interesting folks.
I am in the market for a second hand suit and some gloves and then, AND THEN my friend Eric will help to set me up with a little "nucleus" over summer - in time for them to establish themselves and scurry up enough honey to last over the winter.
I am not exactly scared of bees - its more a high level of respect kind of thing. It would be so lovely to see if some bees would like to come and live in my garden and share their honey.
little bees - I promise to be your devoted, nervous but willing servant.
4 comments:
I was just talking with my, um, honey about bee keeping the other day. We were wondering how hard it is. We live in the country and like many others we're worried about the bee die off and wondering if extra bee keepers would make a difference. I saw a show on TV about honey harvesting recently and it was fascinating. And organic (raw) honey is supposed to be so very good for you with the natural enzymes and such.
Felicia
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HI Felicia - I was AMAZED at how much my confidence grew after going on this little course - all the things I didnt feel comfortable with - like replacing the queen etc, well, in a natural or biodynamic approach - they are not necessary.
Go for bees I say! There are some links to bee sites on the front page of my blog - and I think Rudolph Steiner wrote some papers about biodynamic beekeeping.
At the course there was the lovely permaculture bee keeper, and also a more strict biodynamic bee keeper (doesnt use a queen excluder and lets the bees form a more natural shaped hive over three brooders, and just harvests honey from the outside frames) and a Jordanian woman who kept bees in her village and was able to explain a whole lot of low tech bee keeping practices - like using a fork to puncture the caps rather than a huge steam capping knife - amazing stuff.
yay for bees!
No way!!!! I haven't even read past "another step closer to being bee keepers" - I SOOOO want to get bees! I found a really good bee keeping blog site too - will try to track it down and put it on my sidebar. OK, back to the post now.
Very interesting.
I have spent nearly all my life afraid of bees.
But just recently have overcome my fear to the point where I can walk through bee covered clover (with shoes on).
I am keen to follow this new enterprise of your.
And think I might read up abut it too.
The Blue Mountains Menagerie can never have too many residents!
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