Use Horizontal HIVES for Low-Stress Beekeeping
HOW MANY PEOPLE DREAM of having a few bustling beehives in their backyard? Thousands, surely. But here’s a typical scenario: You go to a beginners’ beekeeping class and do everything suggested. You buy equipment and protective gear, order packages of bees, install them in the hives, feed them sugar, treat them against parasites and disease, and then … they don’t survive the first winter. So you buy more bees the following spring, but the cycle repeats itself.
Faced with high bee mortality rates, mounting costs, and modest returns, even many expert beekeepers hang up their suits. There are half as many bee colonies in the United States today as there were in the 1940s, and the majority of those that do remain are treated with chemicals and trucked around the country to pollinate big commercial monoculture crops, such as almonds. Travel stresses the colonies, spreads disease, and produces honey laced with pesticides. Two-thirds of the honey consumed in the United States today is imported, while the media is full of reports of honeybees dying off on a massive scale.
Fortunately, there’s another way to keep bees: natural beekeeping. Its principles haven’t changed in a thousand years: Observe how bees live in the
