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Permaculture and Honeybees

Two Australians – Bill Mollison and David Holmgren – first described and promoted the techniques for a sustainable way to farm, namely permanent agriculture – or permaculture – in the late 1970’s. Thomas Seeley in his book “The Lives of Bees” advocates for a return to a more natural (Darwinian) and bee-centric method for beekeeping. We propose a beekeeping philosophy that encourages the husbandry of bees to follow the principles of permaculture and to be as close to their evolutionary circumstances as possible. This might mean that honeybees will produce marginally less honey than if intensively farmed using current beekeeping techniques, but – hopefully – honeybees will be less susceptible to pests and diseases and we incur less costs from colony losses and ongoing chemical treatments. The following relevant permaculture principles shape how we think about our operation and, we believe, improve the welfare of bees in our colonies:

Observe and Interact
Minimise Interference
Obtain a Yield
Self Regulate and Welcome Feedback
Widely Spaced Colonies
Produce no Waste
Integrate rather than Segregate
Reinforce the Patterns of Nature
Use and Value Diversity

Use and Value Diversity

Diversity is important to our business in two ways:

First, our genetics is critical to ensuring our stock remains vigorous and healthy. We specialise in Italian and Caucasian bees and we raise and mate these queens in three different locations to ensure a diversity in genetics and the opportunity to harness some of the local adaptations from the wild bees in these locations.

Second, as a business we not only supply queens and nucleus colonies, but we branch out into related areas. For example, the harvest and selling of honey, wax and propolis. We provide instruction and training to beekeepers in southern NSW and we even raise seed for hardy, but attractive herbaceous perennials for our customers to buy and plant in their own “pollinator gardens”.

Use Edges and Value the Marginal

We place our apiaries on the verges and corridors of major changes in the landscape. This includes the edges of towns, boundaries to national parks and changes in vegetation. This improves the variability of forage and also provides different environments to test the performance or our queens so we know that they will perform in a number of different circumstances.

Small Steps

As a small business, we know small and we know gradual. We have built our operation only after ensuring that we understand what we are doing before we move onto the next thing. We don’t rush queen breeding and we build as much diversity and strength into our queens

Reinforce Natural Patterns

We work with the natural behaviour of bees to guide our breeding, rearing and colony replication. We regularly capture swarms, make splits from strong colonies and let them conduct emergency queen rearing and natural mating. This way our colonies are headed by queens selected from larvae chosen by the bees and mated with highly performing, fiercely competitive drones.

Widely Spaced Colonies

Spacing of beehives is very problematic for the commercial beekeeper. Considerable efficiencies are gained by placing hives on pallets and keeping pallets close together so they can be moved quickly. We space our pallets so that each pallet is about 50 metres from the next and keeping no more than 4 – 6 pallets at an apiary site with abundant forage. This has greatly reduced stress and disease among our colonies. As with most things in beekeeping, we must compromise. We aren’t the most efficient operation but we are a smooth operation.

Obtain a Yield

This is not just a yield in honey, it is ensuring that as much of the process as possible yields something useful – especially as an input to another aspect of our operation. We are regularly “turning over” our comb to reduce the disease footprint in our colonies. We then re-use that wax to produce new foundation for our colonies. This way we can ensure that we have high quality wax and we know its provenance, chemical and disease free status.

Minimise Interference

In nature, honey bee colonies precisely organise their nests for caring and promoting the well-being of their brood. Beekeeping techniques such as checker-boarding or inserting empty comb within the brood nest to avoid swarming may disrupt aspects of colony function such as thermoregulation, egg laying and storage by foragers resulting in stress and inefficiency in the colony.

Observe and Interact

We focus a considerable amount of attention on the performance and behavior of our local bees in our local environment. We record the micro climate around our apiaries, regional weather, vegetation and soil types. We also record the behaviour of our bees to understand the basis of their vigor and how they obtain their improved cool climate hardiness. We use technology to help us record important data across the years and adjust our work practices and use of locations to benefit the bee’s well-being.

Creatively Use and Respond to Change

It is easy to stick with the familiar, but the challenges facing modern beekeepers will require new ideas and questioning of some of the “tried and true” lessons. Modern materials, improved science and technology all provide interesting opportunities to improve the husbandry of bees as well as the chance to deal with some of the effects of modern agricultural practice.

Integrate Rather than Segregate

When we place our apiaries we consider a wide number of factors to understand how a location can be leveraged to provide a sustainable environment for our bees. We consider the environment (wind, sun, slope, access to water), vegetation (availability of forage) and the location of nearby towns and built-up areas. Integrating our bees into a location ensures a positive impact from the bees as well as a sustainable operation for us. Not only does it result in a better outcome for our colonies, it also reduces our workload.

Produce No Waste

We are conscious of what we bring into our apiaries and make concerted efforts to give everything more than one use. For example, our 3D printed small hive beetle traps are made from PLA filament which is bio-degradable. We re-use our frames time and time again. Wax is used to make our own foundation. We minimise the use of plastics and even use biodegradable containers for when we ship items to our customers. Glass is a problem – but we are hoping a solution is on the way – namely bio-degradable glass.

Self Assessment and Feedback

Feedback comes not only from the advice of experts or our customers, but self-reflection about our successes and failures. We must listen and be open to receiving feedback from all sources, and most importantly we need to be willing to make changes. This process needs to be continuous – there is never a point where you can stop, put your feet up and say “its done”. Importantly, don’t be afraid to try new things and improvise. Don’t be afraid of failure. If you aren’t making mistakes you aren’t improving.

Obtain A Yield

This is not just a yield in honey, wax or a performing queen, it is ensuring that as much of what you do yields something useful – even if it is only as an input to another aspect of your operation. In our case, we re-use wax to produce new foundation for our colonies. This way we can ensure that we have high quality wax and we know its provenance, chemical and disease free status. When we are checking for swarm cells, we harvest the royal jelly so that we can prime cells in preparation for grafting to ensure that we have healthy queens. We harvest pollen to use in our pollen patties when we feed our bees, we regularly harvest propolis; and, we are always turning over our comb by selling nucs – which further reduces the disease footprint in our colonies.

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