Green BeeKeeping

Quand la fleur fleurira, l'abeille viendra.

Green Beekeeping Practices

Green beekeeping means that you don’t use artificial means to take care of your bees without a good reason.

You ensure they have a good supply of organic flowering plants that haven’t been ruined with dangerous pesticides, and you’re careful not to introduce bacteria to their environment. 

Let Them Eat Honey

The way you do this is you don’t use all their honey for your harvest. Instead, you leave enough honey so that the bees can live through the winter.

You can even freeze some of the frames in case of an emergency. But, leaving the honey bees with their own stores that they produce in the fall is the best way to do it.

Let Them Die

Additionally, instead of trying to save poorly performing hives with fake food, it’s probably better to kill off the queen and introduce the hive to a new queen.

This will make the colony stronger and healthier in the long run, because you don’t keep weak hives alive artificially. 

Start with Two Colonies 

Beginning your beekeeping enterprise with two colonies is a good green practice; you’ll be able to learn faster since no two colonies are the same.

Depending on where you got your bees - whether from a package, nucleus (nuc), or swarm - one hive might be stronger than another.

And having two can help you keep the strongest, thus building a much stronger eco-system of colonies.

Start New Hives in the Spring

New hives should be started in the spring during the heaviest blooming time, because that is when the most nutrition is available.

Leave enough honey for all your hives all the time, so that you don’t have to feed them anything that's bad for them. Feeding healthy bees sugar water is not good nutrition and will produce poor quality honey, leading to more serious problems as time moves on.

Buy Bees That Are Native to Your Area

When you buy bees, buy them from local producers rather than through the mail from a long distance. Locally produced nucs will be healthier and more accustomed to the environment.

Some of the behavior of bees is bred into them from the DNA memory of the bees that came before them. Stick to hives from home. 

Smaller Honey Harvests Are Best

It’s better to have a smaller harvest to keep your bees well fed than it is to harvest everything and feed them junk food to keep them going.

All that happens when you do the latter is that your bees will produce weaker and weaker offspring due to the low nutrition. 

Give Them Space

The other tip that you should consider is not allowing the population of any of your hives to get too high. Always ensure that they have plenty of room. Also, ensure that you keep your hives clean from dead bees to avoid any type of infestation. 

Even though providing the habitat for honey bees is artificial, the closer you can stay to nature in terms of how you care for your bees, the better for the bees, the environment, and your honey harvest.

That’s why it’s so important to learn all that you can about bee behavior in addition to problems that can happen.