Greetings!
Have you gotten interested in natural beekeeping recently? Have you been to “regular” bee school and come away confused by all the focus on diseases and mites and chemical treatments and other things that your heart tells you, deep down, shouldn’t really have anything to do with bees?
Do you somehow feel like you are all by yourself in a crowd - the only person concerned about the way we are treating bees?
I promise you - you are not alone. I felt that way for a time too.

But with all the “sturm und drang” in the news media now about the plight of the honeybee - and especially the concern about “CCD”, (the acronym we use for the scariest of all the current bee problems: “Colony Collapse Disorder”) — it’s not surprising to me any more how many folks are searching for healthier and more natural methods of beekeeping.

I had a similar experience when I first got interested in honey bees. I attended a conventional beekeeping course, and I left those classes thinking “There has just GOT to be a better way”.

There was all this insistence that you MUST treat your bees. You MUST feed your bees. You MUST do this and you MUST do that. But never any talk about what honey bees do, or when, or why, or how they do things when they are doing them their own way.

I definitely felt alone - everyone else seemed to be buying into these methods and the chemical treatments and the manipulations. But I still had a question. A lot of questions, actually, but one big one that to me seemed crucial to understanding bees and beekeeping.

Finally, on the last day of bee school, at the big Q & A session - I gathered up all my courage and got brave enough to ask my biggest question. I thought it was a simple question. Here is what I asked:

“What did bees do before we gave them wax foundation?”

Seems pretty simple, doesn’t it? All I wanted to know was how the bees made honeycomb before beekeepers came along and provided them with rectangular sheets of beeswax with pre-printed hexagons on them. But when I asked that question, you could have heard a pin drop in that classroom.
I still don’t understand why there was such a silence. Maybe it was just too “radical” for a beginning beekeeper to challenge anything about the way bees have been kept in America since 1853. But in the end what happened was this:

I had asked the question. But I got no answer.

So I set out on a quest. What did bees do before beekeepers gave them wax foundation? Or more to the point, what did bees do — before beekeepers?
In very simple terms that quest led to the founding of Gold Star Honeybees, and our very simple answer to a very important question. Top Bar Hives - filled with clean, natural wax honey comb - beeswax made by bees, for bees.

“Because this is what bees did before beekeepers.”

Does this attitude match up with yours? Check us out at www.goldstarhoneybees.com. We’ve been looking for you - we need your help in saving the bees.

Here’s another bee-autific little blurb in our series of bee-attitudes in need of re-calibrating - this is BEE-ATTITUDE #4:
“Left to their own devices, honeybees will raise too many drones.” This one really shocks me. Too many drones? How many drones is too many drones? Who is counting them? Would the bees spend their energy on something they did not need? It doesn’t seem likely to me…
Add to this the effect that limiting drone production has on genetic diversity, and well… that’s a scary thing too.

And it is often said that varroa mites prefer to reproduce in drone comb - but a quick bit of math will show you that it’s just EASIER to get IN to drone cells to breed, since the larval stage, before the cells are capped, is longer by a day than that of a worker. But in fact, having already changed the larval stage of all the bees in the hive by forcing the size of the cell in the way that foundation does - odds are pretty darn good that any old cell will do - and think about this - if we’ve been limiting drone product and that’s such an effective way of reducing the varroa mite population, then why are we at the point where all the wax is contaminated with all the chemicals we had to use to treat for varroa mites in hives that weren’t allowed to raise any drones?
Ouch - that one might make your head spin…

I think the bees know what the numbers should be — there’s no such thing in their minds as “too many” drones.

Does this attitude match up with yours? Check us out at www.goldstarhoneybees.com. We’ve been looking for you - we need your help in saving the bees.

Here’s another bee-autific little blurb in our series of bee-attitudes in need of recalibrating - this is BEE-ATTITUDE #3:
“Top bar hives don’t overwinter in cold climates.” This one appears to have originated with an early philanthropic effort to provide some folks in Kenya with some supplemental income. Sort of a “stimulus package”, if you will. They used horizontal hives made from local materials - and that used no frames or wax foundation - in Kenya - where the temperature ranges from 45 to 99 degrees Fahrenheit. I don’t know about you but I’ve been a number of places a lot closer to home, where temperatures could exceed those numbers on both ends, and people are keeping bees in those places in top bar hives, successfully - and I didn’t have to go to Kenya to see that.
I accumulate a lot of data about top bar hives and how they behave in the various locations where people are keeping them, and the growing list of people who are successfully keeping bees in top bar hives in places where the temperatures range from 5 to 99 degrees F is getting pretty long. So we’re not sure that a top bar hive is only suitable for Kenya’s temperatures…
And we hate to point this out, but logic insists that we must: It would seem, if you were to ask a whole bunch of conventional beekeepers, that bees don’t overwinter in Langstroth hives very well either… or maybe it’s that bees just don’t overwinter well, period. I know too many Langstroth equipment users that lost all of their colonies over a winter, whether a vicious or a mild winter, for it to make sense to say that it can be blamed on the equipment being used. I think that healthier bees overwinter better - and so that’s our focus.
Gold Star Honeybees is also excited to have provided equipment to the Kearsarge Beekeepers group in New Hampshire this season (2010) - This group is studying and documenting the health and behavior of 36 Gold Star Top Bar Hives in New England, USA. So more data will be coming soon - Watch this Space!

Does this attitude match up with yours? Check us out at www.goldstarhoneybees.com. We’ve been looking for you - we need your help in saving the bees.