As discussed earlier, our honey bees did not survive last winter due to somewhat mysterious circumstances. The experience of losing two seemingly healthy and strong hives has created far more questions than answers. Many of the questions that I have about keeping bees are about how to provide the bees with living conditions that most closely mimic those found in "naturally" occurring colonies. My hunch is that, by providing these conditions, bees are able to fully take advantage of their innate tendencies, make more bees, produce a honey crop, and do all of that with a minimal amount of beekeeper intervention. Unfortunately, I think that I have been failing to provide "bee friendly" conditions by using conventional Langstroth hives and their associated methods. Thus the bee deaths of this past winter.
Luckily, there are other people that share my philosophies. Even more fortunate, they write books and have left a paper trail. I have been reading and studying the methods of Fedor Lazutin and Georges de Layens. These methods have been made readily available thanks to the work of Leo Sharashkin. Leo does a fantastic job of presenting how to keep bees in a natural way. What you see in the pictures are swarm traps built by me to the specifications on Leo's website. Catching feral bees or local swarms is an important step in establishing a sustainable apiary. I was a little bit late to the game in putting the swarm traps into trees. Life was a little bit busy while building the traps and I was delayed by a certain baby goat among other things. With some luck, though, I hope to catch a swarm to install in a new hive. Hopefully, there will be more updates to follow this year.
Did you have any luck with your swarm traps and are you using layens hives ? Writing from Barnard , VT
ReplyDelete