Bees & Chickens Make for Healthy Food

The other night as Mitzi and I were working in the square foot garden, some of our acquaintances (who incidentally purchased a set of Catawba Brougham ConvertiCoop plans), dropped in to ask some questions about chickens in general and about specifics of the coop. As I was showing Dean our FrankenGarten, a patch of land where I am experimenting with companion planting, he brought up the subject of bees.

My pop has bees, except that his bees have gone feral. Dad doesn't spend a lot of time tending them nor harvesting honey. I guess he figures if the hive has made it this long, they can keep their hard earned sugary goodness. But they're still out in the woodline by the bottom-land. When I go to visit him, we'll kinda poke around the remaining hive and watch the little critters go about their business. I sometimes like to intentionally stand in the flightpath so that I have bees flying all around me. What a neat sensation. Surprisingly, I've never been stung doing this. I like bees too. Not as much as chickens, but I still like bees.

I've researched topbar hives and how they contribute to creating a healthier colony. I can imagine the emails now... "We have Langstroth hives and haven't lost a hive to colony collapse disorder yet!" I'm cool with that. I know quite a few people who successfully operate Langstroth hives. Our neighbor Larry and his wife own TLC Bees. Mitzi purchases raw honey from them. Chances are his bees pulled nectar out of my garden this past summer. So you could say I am paying Larry a "processing fee" to buy back my own property when I purchase a pint of his honey. I understand that Larry mostly rents out his hives for pollination purposes.

My biggest beef with Langstroth hives is the wax foundation the bees build their comb upon. It has little haxagonal shaped pressed into it that essentially forces the bees to build a honey comb cell that is an unnatural size. Most beekeepers use a 53mm diameter cell. This forces the bees to use less wax to create more honey. Sounds like a good thing right? Except that these same bees would make a 49mm diameter cell in nature. Research has shown that the larger cells encourage the growth of varroa mites.

Update: I've been talking with Todd Warner of the Carolina Bee Company about bees. Todd writes this about the large cell vs. small cell controversy:

Just FYI, the whole small-cell, large-cell thing is still very controversial. The most comprehensive small-cell scientific study had mixed reviews of the practice. Small-cell in fact seemed to encourage the varroa population, for whatever reason. Regardless, more study is needed and only time will tell.

From my experience so far, foundationless is the ultimate way to go if you have the time and patience. I have some foundationless frames in circulation. The bees will build all kinds of cell-sizes, larger and smaller. It's fun to see what they do. The neatest thing is that they build more drone comb (larger cells) than they would normally with foundation to achieve a more natural population proportion (up to maybe even 10% drones instead of the usual 2% with foundation).

So when Dean asked me if I had considered a topbar hive instead of a white box Langstroth hive, I knew instantly what he was talking about. He then proceeded to tell me about a website similar to CatawbaCoops.com called www.BackYardHive.com. Beekeeper Corwin Bell has done for urban apiarists (beekeepers) what Catawba ConvertiCoops has done for chickens; created a functional, simple, yet elegant piece of equpiment that is as much a work of art as a storage vessel for communal animals.

Corwin has a really neat website. I could only hope that CatawbaCoops.com one day grows to the size of the site he maintains. He's created a free PDF file download of his hive plans, and also sells preassembled hived if you're not interested in building it yourself. I am converting Corwin's plans into a Google Sketchup file that's pretty fun to play with. It's in the righthand menu for download. --->