Daren Hess

Healthy Bees - Healthy People - Healthy Planet

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In Natural Beekeeping, Weak Colonies do not Reproduce

In Natural Beekeeping, Weak Colonies do not Reproduce

Given the opportunity, honey bees can adapt rapidly in order to overcome disease, parasites, and other adversity.

Swarming is the act of bee colony reproduction. Weakened colonies do not swarm, therefore the colonies with healthy traits will reproduce.

Also, weak, sick colonies with weak traits do not produce drones (male bees). Healthy colonies that do produce drones contribute to the…

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Black Box Beekeeping

The recent article in American Bee Journal called “Black Box Beekeeping” appears to be a response or rebuttle to a series of articles about what Dr. Tom Seeley would call “Darwinian Beekeeping”

It gives an extreme example of nailing shut the brood nest portion of the beehive and not ever messing with it. This theoretically would allow the bees to function normally all on their own, but would…

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Letting Bees Thrive

This is my beekeeping philosophy in a nutshell. The first and most important principal that I employ is this: Bees have all the tools they need to be healthy and thrive provided they have a good home and access to sufficient clean food and water.

God created honey bees to be adaptable to a wide variety of environments and circumstances. Our default attitude toward bees should be to let them…

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Everyone Should Have Honeybees

Notice the title does not say, “Everyone Should KEEP Honeybees” BeeKEEPing isn’t for everyone, but anyone can have bees. Bee-having is a hands off approach that let’s bees do their own thing.  It’s simply providing a home for a colony of bees with little or no interference from us.  There are a few simple steps to have bees:   First, purchase a beehive box from any beekeeping supplier (look…

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Why We Should Eat More Crystallized Honey

Why We Should Eat More Crystallized Honey

Crystallized Honey is the natural state of honey as we move into winter.  It occurs naturally as the weather gets cooler. We are so used to our honey bears and other squeeze jars, that when we see crystallized honey, we think there is something is wrong with it.  That couldn’t be further from the truth.  Here’s why we should eat more of it: It has an amazing texture and flavor.  I enjoy it with a…

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What's so special about beeswax candles?

What’s so special about beeswax candles?

Last year somebody asked me what the difference is between beeswax candles and regular candles.  At the time I really didn’t know, but now I do. The biggest difference is what they are made of. Most candles (the cheap ones for sure) are made of paraffin.  According to Wikipedia, Paraffin wax is a white or colorless soft solid derivable from petroleum, coal, or oil shale.  It is a byproduct of…

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How to Kill Honey Bees (sarcasm warning)

How to Kill Honey Bees (sarcasm warning)

Have you ever tried to kill ants?  When I was a kid I would stomp on them..but they kept coming.  You can spray ants and they’ll keep coming.  Finally I learned that you need to kill the nest, you need them to take the poison back to their nest, and that poison needs to be sub-lethal to the individual ant, or else they’ll never make it. Bees are very similar. You can stomp on them all day (I…

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Dmitriy inspecting the bees

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Wanted: One Million Beekeepers

But not just any beekeepers. We ask a lot of our bees.  They fill a crucial role in our agricultural food system and we couldn’t do without them, nor can we do without the commercial beekeepers that ensure that the bees are ready for pollinating a third of what we eat.  Probably every beekeeper would admit that bees are pushed really hard in order to do this. Being trucked back and forth across…

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How Can You Determine if Honey is Fake?

Espi asks:  “I buy 5 lbs tin honey from the supermarket for US$15.00 called mountain honey raw. Lately I am not convinced it is real honey as I am thinking  how can it be so cheap.  So I read lot about honey and want to get some genuine advise from you how to say if the honey if real or fake. I will appreciate if you will give me some guidance how to buy good honey”. Great question.  I’ll start…

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Legalize weeds for bees sake (that’s weeds not weed)

Whether you are driving through the suburbs among manicured lawns and tidy flowerbeds, or through the well kept peach orchards or vineyards of Central California, there is one thing you don’t see much of these days.  Weeds.

Weeds are one of nature’s attempts to bring back a semblance of balance back into our open space.  Try as we might to bring the tidiness of our homes out to the outdoors, the weeds don’t seem to cooperate, until we make a trip down to home depot and use Round-Up to beat them into submission.

What does this have to do with honeybees and other pollinators?  After all, weed killer is an herbicide and bees are insects.  When bees see an orchard with a clean, weed-free floor, from their point of view, it may as well be a Sahara sand dune.  But when they buzz past a vineyard or backyard with wild undergrowth, they see a smorgasbord, a buffet, a salad bar.

One of the biggest problems that bees face, one of the main reasons for their decline is lack of clean forage.  Bees get protein, vitamins and minerals from plant pollen.  They get carbohydrates from the sweet plant nectar that they use to make honey.  What happens if you don’t eat a balanced diet of clean, chemical-free food?  You get sick.  Bees are no different.

I’m not saying that we should let everything go and revert to wildness.  We can be strategic about this.  By purposely planting bee friendly ground cover, such as clover, hairy vetch or thyme we can suppress the ugly weeds while adding a carpet that is pleasing to the eye and even the nose.

Go ahead, you have a beekeepers permission to ease up a little on the weeds.

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Some good news about bees

When you watch the news, almost weekly you hear stories about the steep decline of bees and experts are interviewed with shrugged shoulders and no explanations of what to about it.  What makes it worse is the idea that 33% of our food supply is dependent on these little creatures.  Its enough to make anyone depressed.

Here’s the good news:  The bees will be just fine.  Honey bees have been around for a long time and God has given them a profound ability to adapt and overcome obstacles.  My hope is that we can get the ship turned around before the cost to produce certain foods goes through the roof.  I think we can.

Lets get right down to it.  The problem that honey bees are having is STRESS.    It’s as simple as that, and we really shouldn’t be surprised.  In human beings, 90% of  disease is caused or complicated by stress.  Its no different with honey bees.

Of course there are some causes of stress that are inherent to living life and there are others that we bring about ourselves.  We need to focus on the causes of stress that we can do something about.  If we resolve those, the bees will have the ability to deal with the rest.

First the human caused stress factors:   Pesticides, fungicides, lack of habitat, lack to clean forage, migratory beekeeping practices, “chemotherapy” treatments used on bee colonies, Substituting sugar syrup for real honey and protein patties for real pollen, invasive beekeeping practices.

Second, the nature caused stress factors:  Parasites, pathogens, weather changes.

In future posts, I’ll give simple solutions that all of us can do that will cause real change.

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How can you tell if honey is fake?

Espi asks:  “I buy 5 lbs tin honey from the supermarket for US$15.00 called mountain honey raw. Lately I am not convinced it is real honey as I am thinking  how can it be so cheap.  So I read lot about honey and want to get some genuine advise from you how to say if the honey if real or fake. I will appreciate if you will give me some guidance how to buy good honey”.

Great question.  I’ll start with the best way to get real honey,  Contact a real beekeeper and get some directly from them.  Visit a farmers market, or call them on the phone. Ask them where it comes from, or ask if you can visit their bee yard sometime.  Then give the beekeeper feedback on how much you enjoyed the honey!

The more steps you are away from buying directly from the beekeeper, the less confident you will be that it is real, raw honey.  The second best way is to by from a locally owned market that has a relationship with a beekeeper.

If honey is in a supermarket and labeled as “raw" it will very likely be crystallized, which is a good sign that it hasn’t been processed too much.  Raw honey purchased from a beekeeper might be liquid or solid, since he/she can use honey warmers to keep the liquid state.

If you buy standard honey from the supermarket, there is a good chance that it has been ultra- filtered and therefore there is no way of telling if it is real or not or where it came from.  Even a scientist wouldn’t be able to tell if its been adulterated or smuggled from China.

If you don’t want to keep your own bees, at least have a beekeeper.  The more we can get food directly from the source, the more confidence we can have in the quality of our food.