Tag Archives: Warre

The Season Hits with a Vengeance

Other than a short break for a mate’s 50th party, it’s been manic here again. If my working day was any longer, on my way back to the house, I would meet myself going out the next morning.

I was going to explain why it’s been so busy, but perhaps I’ll just update you all with what I’ve been up to, which includes a visit from world famous Permaculturalist, and author, Patrick Whitefield.

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New Swarm Put into Warre Hive

Today was a good day. I manage bees for a local company, who own a biodynamic farm over the road from me. The bees are managed without opening the hives, which means that I check them every day during the swarming season, in order to try and take any swarms after they emerge from the hive.We also have bait hives out. They show when a swarm is looking for a new home, and can be occupied by a swarm. I had two swarms fly into bait hives last year.

A couple of days ago I warned them that I thought that the hives were close to swarming, and that we should check them twice a day for the next few days. My reasons were simple. Both hives were very busy, had lots of drones flying, we had kept them to two national brood boxes to restrict the space in the hive, and the cold snap was likely to have held them back from swarming, with the weather due to improve over the weekend, it just seemed likely. Not concrete proof, but a bit of educated intuition.

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The Sustainable Smallholding End of Year Roundup

2009 was another busy year at the Sustainable Smallholding, with changes to the management of my bees, an increase in the number of chickens, and hives, the addition of ducks, the creation of swales, and lots of experimental growing. This included growing tobacco, manuka, eucalyptus, acacia, small scale wheat growing etc. So I thought that I’d do a short summary, and a look forward to my plans for next year.

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Warre Beekeeping to feature in Permaculture magazine

Reading the Warre Forum, I see that the first of a two part article on beekeeping with the Warre hive has been accepted by Permaculture Magazine.

The Warre system of beekeeping is a low imput/lowoutput system that seems ideally suited to Permaculturists. It maintains that excessive intervention by the beekeeper increases stress within the colony, and  a corresponding reduction in health.

I suggested to David Heaf, the man responsible for bringing the system to the attention of the English-speaking world, that Permaculture Magazine would be a good publication to ‘target’ in order to increase the number of Warre beekeepers. Hopefully I haven’t led him astray.

The Permaculture magazine website can be found at

http://www.permaculture-magazine.co.uk/

If you cannot wait for the article to appear in the magazine, there is a link to David’s site in the Blogroll.

I would be happy to answer questions about the Warre system on this blog.