Published in An Beachaire
About 14 years ago, I was introduced to bee-keeping when I went to visit an apiary. I did not know what to expect and it was been a big surprise, not to say a profound shock. My back ground is agricultural science (I run kitchen gardening courses with a very minimalistic and sustainable approach). My approach is the less we do, the less can go wrong. Montesquieu, a French philosopher wrote in 1689 “Ce qui n’est point utile à l’essaim, n’est point utile à l’abeille. » (what is not useful to the swarm, is not useful to the bee). I was therefore, amazed to discover that the “craft” seemed very intensive and more suited to the bee-keeper than to the bees. Honey bees were the first animal to have been “industrialised “. This happened around the Victorian period, well before that of the battery hen and pig factories. By “industrialised” I mean that all the breeding, harvesting and feeding is done through protocolised methods.
The boxes, frames, size of the cells, feeders, etc. are all man-made and standardised. The robbed honey crop is replaced by sugar syrup. The queens are “grafted” and requeened every year to avoid swarming or instead queen cells are crushed every nine days. As a Christmas gift, fondant is given generously! The native Irish black bee has been replaced by the more prolific buckfast. Even artificial insemination is used nowadays. Of course, not all beekeepers manage their colonies like that but many problems are actually inherent to the design of the conventional hive and the intensive approach of the bee-keeper. I had to find an alternative where bees would be allowed to build their own combs, where bees could be fed with their own honey and a system where I could harvest a smaller quantity of prime wild honey. Being French, the Warré hive seemed very enticing. Abbe Warré originated from the north of France and he devised his eponymous hive just after WW2. It is basically a divisible vertical hive. All the boxes have the same internal dimension (like the rose hive or the Langstroth). It is the smallest hive. The boxes measure 30cm x 30cm x 21cm. Two Warre boxes with top bar are the same as one brood box of National. Abbe Warre tested 350 different types of hives before adopting his design. It is a hybrid between a skep and a “modern hive”. Many of the managing techniques are directly inspired from skep beekeeping.
It is very close to the old “butter box” system used in Ireland during WW2 when money was scarce. Above all it is a top bar hive, you only need eight wooden laths or bars on top of the first box and the bees will happily build down their own combs with the arrangement that suits them better. The combs will be sealed on the box’s side walls and the top bars. These will be covered with a fabric that the bee will coat with propolis. This means that in the spring time, there is no void around and above the nest, but rather a “wall” of propolis (very useful to protect the nest) and nine partitions where the queen can efficiently start her brood rearing. The void created by the frames is a major cause of uncontrolled condensation in a hive. The boxes are usually added underneath (nadiring), the top box filled with honey is harvested if enough stores are available for the winter. This could result in five to six boxes tall at the end of the season. The old wax is systematically taken away with the honey crop. It makes healthy colonies. The management of such hives is very simple. They can be split before swarming. It is also possible to drive up the bees and the old queen of a very strong colony into an empty box placed on top of the hive. The old queen and the equivalent of a swarm can then be removed, and the remainder divided up. This means you can obtain three colonies from a strong one. The queens made from such a split are very strong because only the fittest amongst all the queens raised naturally by the colony will survive and they get plenty of nurse bees and lots of pollen and honey. Natural bee-keepers leave the bees to swarm. Some leave the weakest colonies to collapse during the winter in order to ensure a healthy Darwinian selection.
I personally feel that this harsh process can be avoided and it is more humane to replace one queen than leave thousands of bees to such a terrible fate. I help the bees riddled with varroa to survive the winter using apiguard in August and/or vaporised oxalic acid during the winter and I shook swarm those colonies in May into an empty hive and then requeen in June with a queen from a stronger colony. I place a box with a strong young queen on top of the colony I want to requeen with newspapers in between. The big advantage with shook swarming is that the colony will drop its drones (Freres and Guillaume) avoiding unnecessary dispersion of unwanted genes. The old wax is discarded with the brood. Selection is done quickly and efficiently. When I started, I ordered some “black bees” only to learn in the apiary that they were actually “F2”. The experience has been very educative. Those bees used a lot of stores during the winter and they build up so quickly and unnaturally that they were unmanageable in my Warre boxes. I have since requeened and bought Irish black bees from reputable sellers. It makes a big difference. The Irish black bee is very thrifty and I could notice up to 10kg of stores left in the spring compare to the yellow bees that nearly needed to be fed! I prepare for winter in June and July when weaker colonies are united with a strong young queen. I only winter strong colonies with up to twenty kilos of store for the winter. Feeding is never done because I do not keep weak stock. It is said that nine kilos of store is enough and Abbe Warre used to leave twelve kilos.
The ivy is a real gift every year. The volume of the boxes is ideal for the winter cluster. The bees will go upward through the honey during the winter. The queen will usually start the nest in the warmest top box and the honey flow will push the cluster down. This is why the boxes are added from below . This mimics a natural colony which draws wax downwards, puts its stores on top of the nest to insulate it and use the stores through the winter by just going up through it, leaving an empty space that will be used by the queen to start the nest. This ascending and descending approach is dictated by the season, the flow of honey and the egg laying of the queen. It is why the vertical top bar hive is not very good in Ireland. I suppose also, it is why the conventional hives are not so efficient also during the winter. They are too flat and the stores are situated on the sides which is the opposite of a system devised for the bees. Some of my boxes are equipped with a glass pane and it is possible to watch inside without opening. This is a very quick way for a beginner to assess a colony. “At the hive entrance” from Heinrich Storch is an invaluable booklet to leaf through from time to time. A few bait hives will tell you the swarming mood of the colonies. And if you do not know which hive is going to swarm, a little bit of flour sprinkled on the scout will lead you straight to the culprit. There are many ways to check a Warre hive but opening is seldom done. In brief, it is an uncomplicated little hive that allows bees to be kept in a relaxed manner. It works very well in Ireland, Russia, USA, Australia and many other countries.