Saturday May 5, 2012 – Saturday May 5, 2012
270 Ferry Rd
Description:
This workshop will cover the basics of bee keeping and how to build a Warre top bar hive.
Why beekeeping? Well, to begin with there is the honey but if you really look at bees, you will find the honey takes second place to just having one of the most cooperative and brilliant insects buzzing in and out of your backyard (or in my case, my townhouse balcony as well as at 270) and observing just how a super-organism works. An analogy for a bee hive is the human body. Just like our body is made up of so many different cells and constituent parts and forms a human body which is in effect, a super organism, the bee hive consisting of upwards of 40 – 50 thousand bees has every bee carrying out specific duties and work that is seamless in terms of cooperation with the others in the hive that it makes up a super-organism. The decisions to re-queen, to swarm to do absolutely everything in the hive are taken by the hive as a whole.
In addition to having this in your head, you can also enjoy the fruits of their labour by having a Warre top bar hive. The Warre hive is a low maintenance bee hive designed by a French priest in the 19th Century. It is much more bee friendly in that the number of intrusive examinations of the hive that take place in ‘commercial’ hives such as the Langstroth that we have at 270 are not required with the Warre hive. Also, the bees are able to build the comb in the hive according the size requirements that they need as opposed to the specified size requirements of wax sheeting or old comb that are currently used in standard hives.
The afternoon will show you how to build a Warre hive that you can have in your own back yard. We will also have a horizontal top bar hive based upon the Warre system for you to inspect. This hive is a bit of a Rolls Royce built by our in-house carpenter extraordinaire, Graeme Rollo. Graeme has contributed so much to our bee hive stocks and our ability to keep bees. However, these hives can be built out of rough and ready material such as pallets.