The Diary Below is from the month before Covid Hit Ireland. February 2020. I’m going to do a beekeeping Diary, so, thought I’d start from the beginning. Hence references to packed rooms.
My daughter loves it. That I am going to bee school. She packs my notebook. She tells me to bring lunch. “For bee school, Dada. You forgot it last time”. School is her thing. She’s the expert. She tells me what I will need. What it will be like. And she makes me lunch. Because that’s what you eat at school. At 9pm. It is all the kinds of carbohydrates we have in one box. And some grapes. And yes. I do eat it.
Bee school is a Powerpoint presentation in a darkened room with a beekeeper who talks about Man quite a bit. Man eats honey. Man has been cultivating bees for millenia. Man needs bees to pollinate crops. Man must save the bees but, if it comes down to it, Man could live on root vegetables if he needed to. Man needs to pay €60 for a ten session course.
The room is packed. At least a third of the class are women. Man is not the only one interested in beekeeping.
I sit at the back of the class. I don’t talk to people. I don’t ask questions. I know most of what he tells me already. Not because I’m smart. Or a natural talent. But because I am obsessive about knowledge. Because I think if I learn something at a lecture then I’ve failed in my preparation. And because if I know the answer already I wont have to ask anyone. I won’t have to talk to people. Woman might be a social animal. Man too. I am not. Other students mix. Make connections, share knowledge. There’s a waggle dance here. That I can’t follow. A social convention playing out as a complex set of interactions. Common purpose. Shared goals. Communication. Words. Being said. Conversationally. To other people.
But not by me.
I type small notes on my phone. Small snippets, useful tricks. Questions I can ask the internet quietly later.
I want to keep bees. Farming has been good for me. Herds, flocks, lambs, goats, pigs and ewes are. Well. Accepting. I realise as I write, that this is an odd thing to say. But it is also true. There is something wonderful in working with something so different and alien that any of the ordinary oddities of character get lost in the massive gap. It will, I think, be the same with bees. You say potato. I say everything I can remember about the subject and associated phenomena that might have a bearing on our mutual understanding of potatoes in eye watering detail.
I don’t think bees mind eye watering levels of technical detail in lieu of small talk.
Beekeeping school is filled with treatments. Strips. Vapours. Powders. Chemical and herbal medicines to dose the hive with. The correct ratio of water to sugar to feed the bees with. How much sugar to add so they can overwinter. Based on the idea that we have imported varroa, and may other diseases, along with non native bees not well suited to our climate. So we need to save them by treating, managing, medicating, requeening, breeding and importing resistant bees. That’s not for me. We will go with natural beekeeping. Take less honey. Leave more. Create a habitat that forage rich for the bees. Try to ensure we have local, native, well adapted bees that we catch wild. Use better hive designs to give them a shot at thriving. Healthy well fed well housed bees have the best shot at developing disease resistance. Im not criticising conventional beekeepers. There’s so much passion, knowledge and love in them. And so much to learn from them even if my path diverges from theirs.
I am building a top bar hive (plans here and here). It’s not the standard type. Not the most productive. It’s difficult to buy bees for. Unless you catch a swarm. It’s homemade. It’s cheap. It’s hands on. It’s backed by lots of natural beekeeping practitioners. It’s easier on the bees, closer, in some ways, to a natural hive. If you hold the comb the wrong way it will break. Most people don’t use them. You can’t get parts. You make parts. There’s no one, really, to ask questions of about them. This is all…quite…me.
Both the children want to make a hive with me. My son, waking up, reeling with the pain of an ear infection, watched honey harvesting videos with me at 2 am to distract him. He makes notes, connections, suggestions. He sees how gentle people are. He criticises someone. They are using too much smoke, and they have comb in the wrong place. The bees will drown or be crushed when they harvest honey. He is right. He remembers. Children do. At bedtime, they both want their story to be what I learned about bees at bee school. I am at a stage in my life where if my children take an interest in anything I do, they will become better at it that I can ever hope to be. They learn so much faster. This is good. Right. Proper. Our children should outpace us. Be better. Do better. Learn more. Succeed. It is, really, our only and best hope in this difficult and challenged world.
I see beekeepers default to a level of detail and obtuse knowledge as the rule, and not the exception. With quiet pride, often, with a shared sense of the worth of knowledge, and the aptness and desirability of correctness. Some, perhaps, more in love with knowledge than nature, some more with nature than knowing. But with admiration for the detail in both. I am looking forward to adding my distinctiveness to their own. I think it might well fit.
Dave Cushman has a nice breakdown from a kinda conventional perspective on what he thinks is good and not so good about Natural Beekeeping.
Agricology have a nice .pdf that focuses on Natural Beekeeping and how Habitat and Bee genetics are key to it as a practice and philosophy
If you are in Ireland, and want Native Bees, the Native Irish Honeybee Society are a good start. Good people, and they can help source a seller of the frugal, tough, Irish weather tolerant Black Bee.
