If you’re a Natural Beekeeper, then beeswax is part of your harvest – when you crush your natural comb to extract the honey, there’s beeswax to spare. That’s how beekeeping with natural comb works. It’s a good thing for your bees, because … Continued
Here’s a few photos from our Autumn Natural Beekeeping course in Sydney, and some resources for you to be reading over Winter. These shots are from opening a hive that Adam Kennedy, who hosts our Natural Beekeeping courses, caught as … Continued
It’s fab, it’s new, and the honey flows straight into the jar. It’s so easy. But then, powdered instant potato is easy, too. Does that make it a good idea? Despite my mission to focus on positivistic messages of change, at … Continued
One of the gorgeous features of a Warré Hive is their cute gabled roofs. In Australia, those gables help primarily with insulating the hive from extreme heat (and therefore lowering colony stress) by providing circulation. The Warré Hive was, however, … Continued
More than ever, the world is waking up to the importance of bees in our ecology. More and more folk are exploring beekeeping, whether it’s for the honey harvest, the extra pollination of our food thanks to those bees working … Continued
Australian native stingless bees are similar to european honeybees in many ways, but they’re also very different, too. This week I was lucky enough to attend a harvest and a hive split of these amazing social insects, in a inner-city … Continued
Being a beginner beekeeper involves asking an awful lot of questions. In a good way. You are, after all, taking on the stewardship of a super-organism composed of between 20 and 60,000 individual bees. In light of the constant stream … Continued
This is a great little video from Gaia Bees, an American natural beekeeper doing some very interesting work in bee colony resilience and apicentric beekeeping. The super interesting thing about this video is that it clearly shows how, in a … Continued
Once you start natural beekeeping with Warré hives, you can look forward to your first honey harvest. Harvesting from a Warré hive means crushing frames of luscious honeycomb to remove the honey. That is, if you don’t eat all your harvest straight up as … Continued
‘Sugarbag bees’ are the common name for Australia’s native and social stingless bees, which home themselves in hollow logs and produce these amazing hexagonal spiral combs to rear their baby bees in. These stingless bees can also be kept in … Continued
The other day Tim Malfroy, our mate and esteemed Warré beekeeper, came over to talk bees and check the Milkwood hives. We had hoped to split our two Warré hives into four colonies this season, but it looks like we’re … Continued
Sun Hives are a hive design coming out of Germany and now gathering interest in Britain. They’re part of the world-wide movement towards ‘apicentric’ beekeeping – beekeeping that prioritizes honeybees firstly as pollinators, with honey production being a secondary goal. … Continued
This Summer has been downright weird, weather-wise. Which has meant all sorts of things, for all sorts of things. Including for the bees of Milkwood Farm, and the bees of eastern Australia in general. For the central west of NSW … Continued
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