The Idle Beekeeper: The Low-Effort, Natural Way to Raise Bees

by Bill Anderson

Overview

From building a hive to harvesting honey, a top urban beekeeper shares how to care for bees the simple, mindful way.

Global bee populations have been rapidly declining for years, and it’s not just our honey supply that’s at stake: the contribution of bees to the pollination of crops is essential to human survival. But even in industrial apiaries, bees are in distress, hiving in synthetic and hostile environments. Enter idle beekeeping: the grassroots, low-intervention system that seeks to emulate the behavior and habitat of bees in the wild—and it only requires two active days of beekeeping per year, one in the spring and another in the fall.

In The Idle Beekeeper, Bill Anderson calls upon his years of applied curiosity as an urban beekeeper to celebrate these underappreciated insects and show how simple and rewarding beekeeping can be. In this entertaining, philosophical, and practical guide, Anderson shares why and how to build a hive system that is both cutting-edge and radically old. Maximum idleness is achieved through step-by-step directions to help the beekeeper gently harvest honey with minimum effort, make mead and beeswax candles, and closely observe and understand these fascinating and productive social creatures. For anyone interested in keeping bees, The Idle Beekeeper is the definitive guide to getting started, even in a city, and without effort.

Includes information on:

• Building your idle hive
• Caring for your colony
• Harvesting honey
• Making mead
• Making beeswax candles
• Being mindful and empathetic while raising bees
• And more

Praise for The Idle Beekeeper

“Charming. . . . Anderson . . . lays out a low-maintenance approach to his hobby. . . . Readers keen on actually keeping bees themselves should find this information-packed book’s instructional component particularly useful, and Anderson’s fellow idlers will appreciate his laissez-faire personal ethos.” —Publishers Weekly

“Anderson’s love of bees and beekeeping is apparent and creates an effective enticement for readers to become beekeepers. His minimalist approach provides an easy entry to a potentially intimidating pastime.” —Booklist

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781468317077
Publisher:	ABRAMS, Inc.
Publication date:	08/16/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	290
File size:	22 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Bill Anderson is an urban beekeeper and educator based in London who writes the regular beekeeping column for The Idler Magazine, and his online Idle Beekeeping course is currently available from The Idler website. The other 363 days he isn't tending to his hives, Anderson is a television drama director, working on a huge variety of shows, including Dr. Who and Mr. Selfridge.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Idle Isn't Lazy ...

... like a honey bee isn't a wasp. Superficially there are many similarities: size, shape, color, buzzing about, stinging. But although carnivorous wasps pollinate flowers, they don't provide honey. Vegetarian honey bees do.

And while both idle and lazy people seem to be similarly workshy, it's what they do with the time they're not working that makes the difference. Truly lazy people rarely cultivate themselves or the world around them. Idlers try to do both by cannily spending as little time as possible in drudgery so they can invest the maximum doing things that interest them, that make them grow.

The current rate of exchange offered by idle beekeeping is this: to get honey, wax, mead, and a share in the welfare of the bee population and the planet, you need to commit to attending your idle beehive on two occasions per year. That's not two days of work. It may be as little as a couple of hours, twice a year. You are of course entitled to spend as long as you like at the hive, entranced by the comings and goings of the bees, but this is idle contemplation, not laziness, and it's not compulsory even when it becomes compelling.

If having only two dates in your annual diary seems too good to be true, we used to get away with less. As beekeepers we effortlessly achieved a pinnacle of idleness for fifteen million years by employing the best and most basic strategy of work avoidance: don't turn up.

For fifteen thousand millennia before we took on the challenge of putting the Sapiens into Homo, honey bees were flying through the air, navigating with astonishing accuracy to pollinate plants as they gathered food to raise their young in structures they constructed with mathematical precision. They worked out what they needed to do and they got on with it, without any help from us whatsoever, while we were still enraptured by our discovery of the amazing things you could do with the sharp edge of a bit of flint and opposing thumbs.

But before we were even standing upright on our two hind legs, we must have salivated at the smell of warm honey mellifluously floating down from high up in the tree canopy. And eventually connected the converging flight paths of bees as they congregated at their sweet source: a cavity in the trunk of a tree.

That was the moment we turned up at the bees' doorstep, and things got a lot less idle.

So overpoweringly delicious was the smell of that honey we risked climbing to great heights and braved the intense pain of hundreds of stings to steal the sweet treasure of the bees. When we mastered fire, smoke helped us confuse the bees and mitigate the stings.

When we mastered tools, we were able to hack away at the tree and expand the entrance to the cavity so we could extract every last drop.

We weren't beekeepers yet — we were bee killers. It wasn't just the honey we stole: the baby bees, larvae carefully nursed in their individual cells of the honeycomb, are an excellent source of protein and fat. We devoured them alive. Very few colonies of bees would have survived this onslaught, but we were hunter-gatherers of no fixed abode, took what we wanted, and moved on: pillage, not tillage.

Then around ten thousand years ago the idea caught on that instead of roaming out into the world to feed ourselves, we could make the world of food come to us. The revolutionary concept of agriculture and home. We began to settle down, and bees became a wild part of our farming. As with all the plants and animals we were cultivating, we would try to re-create their natural environment on our doorstep.

So we made containers with small, defendable entrances similar to the cavities where we'd seen bees living in trees. And when a swarm issued from one of those cavities and formed into a foot-ball-sized cluster of bees hanging from a nearby branch while it decided where to go and make its new home, we would come along and help it make up its mind by dislodging it into our container and taking it back to ours.

But from the get-go this was a process of enticement, not incarceration — to this day humans haven't devised a hive system with a lock and key. Unlike other animals we cage or fence in, the hive entrance has to be open for blossom-grazing bees to roam the airways as they please. They are wild like The Clash, and "Should I stay or should I go?" is the royal prerogative of their queen.

But she doesn't require any fancy abode — merely what her lineage of fifteen million years had become accustomed to. And the foundations of those palatial tree cavities that primitive beekeepers were trying to copy had been hollowed out by fungus. Those polypore spores that managed to penetrate the tree's defenses and start rotting down the wood fibers weren't guided by set squares, protractors, or spirit levels. Like us they were driven by appetite and organically munched away with the minimum of effort. So no straight lines or right angles for bee palace providers to pursue.

One of our more popular and enduring designs is the skep. Its familiar dome shape, made from a coil of twisted tall grass stitched together with the split stems of willow or bramble, is easy to make, light, and strong enough to take the weight of a man standing on it.

Inside, the bees would treat it in exactly the same way as an empty tree cavity they'd found: hanging from the top, they'd build pendulous, parallel combs of wax that they'd fill with babies and honey.

But we didn't make reusable skeps to save the bees, we made them to save us the work of finding wild colonies, then climbing and hacking away at trees. When it came to harvesting the honey, we still killed all the bees in our skeps to prize them away from it. The forest was still our near neighbor, and it was a regenerating source of swarms, so we didn't have to worry too much about where our replacement bees would come from. Indeed our skeps would themselves issue swarms that, with a bit of luck, we could capture in another skep.

We had become swarm-hunters-and-gatherers. But those clustering balls of adult bees looking for a new home contain no available honeycomb and no babies — very little nutrition for us, and all of it capable of flying away. So swarms had been of little interest until we became able to coax them into places where they would make babies and store honey. And then we started to see them as deferred deliciousness.

For thousands of years, whether in skeps, clay pots, logs, or anything else that we could fit bees into, we carried on killing bees to enjoy their honey.

Then on October 25, 1852, the carpenter's set square fought its corner and found the right angle to intersect with the world of beekeeping: U.S. Patent No. 9300 was granted to the Reverend Lorenzo Langstroth for the design of a new beehive. And that's when things started to get precise.

Gone was the near-enough-is-good-enough of hand-twisted grass lashed together by eye. Langstroth's wooden hive was like a mini–chest of drawers lying on its back. With eight or more drawers that not only had to fit tightly together, they all had to open and close smoothly.

You'd need to be a carpenter bordering on cabinetmaker to have the level of woodworking skill to construct this hive. And yet Langstroth's design now underpins the vast majority of beehives on our planet. Its global success is down to its ability to allow the beekeeper to remove honey from the hive without killing the bees. And to extract that honey in industrial quantities.

Langstroth's hive neatly confined the bees' free-form honeycomb building into rectangular wooden frames, like drawers without a bottom. And these frames can be easily removed with their contents intact. Honey from a filing cabinet? It isn't quite that simple, because producing honey isn't the bees' primary purpose: it's having babies. They're all laid by the one queen bee living in the hive, and at the height of the summer she can deliver up to two thousand kids every twenty-four hours.

In my entire life I've had three. Admittedly the queen bee can have upward of twenty thousand family members actively helping raise hers, but there are some things we do have in common, and one of them is the way kids take over your home. Not in a directly tyrannical way — they didn't ask to be born, as they will later tell you — but through the requirements and logistics their rearing demands. From the vomit stains on your shoulders that inspire you to ensure that every room in your house is filled with as many muslin squares as an artisan cheesery, to the ubiquitous scattering of toys that might briefly distract an inconsolably crying baby but will definitely hobble the sleepy, barefoot lullaby singer, needs-must rapidly takes over: diapers are never where they're supposed to be, they're where you last used them; food could be literally anywhere, from rusks in your undergarments drawer to bananas in your letterbox; and empty, unwashed bottles are usually lying where sleep finally released them from the gums of your progeny. Even when your children have grown into the bedrooms you've laboriously provided for them, the idea of any child-free space in your home is a delusional parental fantasy.

Likewise the beehive: dismiss any hopes of simply sliding out a frame of honeycomb that doesn't come with a brood of larvae wriggling in the middle of it, surrounded by baby food and a lot of protective nurse bees.

So Langstroth, who also had three children, contrived a childfree space in his hive. Between two of the chest-of-drawer hive boxes there is a barrier full of holes of a very particular size. It's called a queen excluder:

The queen bee is larger than all the worker bees, and she is too big to pass through the holes in the queen excluder, so she's stuck in the bottom box, where she lays all the eggs. The smaller worker bees can easily crawl through the holes and move freely into the upper box, the child-free space, where they exclusively store the honey. Langstroth's hive separates the babies from the honey in a way that allows the beekeeper to take that honey without disturbing the kids.

Top drawer. For the beekeeper.

Murder commuted to burglary from the bees' point of view. But at least now we qualified as true beekeepers: at the most basic level, we deliberately kept our bees alive, and we started to really make them earn their keep.

Langstroth's patent came seventy years after patents by James Watt for his steam engine and James Hargreaves for his textile spinning jenny, inventions that combined to create the first factories of the Industrial Revolution. So the universal benefit of human intervention to maximize productivity and efficiency was by now an established creed. And because Langstroth's frames allowed combs to be individually pulled out, forensically examined, and then replaced, the inner workings of the living hive could be observed. Through the eyes of Industrial Revolutionaries:

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

This representation of British society — nine layers of classes and trades, with the bank, armed services, and volunteers at the foundation and the monarch at the top — was etched by George Cruikshank, one of Charles Dickens's illustrators, fifteen years after Langstroth's invention. In 1867 Cruikshank published it to make the political point that everything was buzzing along beautifully and there was no need to give the working man the vote.

The honey bee colony consists of around fifty thousand bees, the vast majority of them female worker bees whose short careers develop through a progression of jobs. After three weeks as larvae then pupae, they hatch as adults. For the next three weeks inside the hive they will perform a plethora of distinct tasks including cleaning, nursing, housekeeping, undertaking, and guarding the entrance before a final three weeks of flying outside the hive to collect food. A much smaller number of bigger, male bees — called "drones" because their larger wings give their buzz a lower, louder tone — have only one primary job: inseminator. And an even larger single queen bee, usually found at the bottom of the hive, not the top, gives birth to all the children.

Our perception of the industrious bee society as a role model for our own was of course a two-way street. In Langstroth's time the buzzword for the hive was "hierarchy"; nowadays "collaborative superorganism" might be a better fit — the bees haven't changed much in all that time, just our projections of ourselves.

But because Langstroth allowed us to get under the bonnet of the beehive, we became able to start tinkering about, or "improving." And our goal was sweet and clear: more honey. So we manipulated the environment for the bees inside the hive to exploit their behavior in ways that maximize honey production. We did everything we could to turbocharge that one aspect of the bees' lives. But as any car mechanic will tell you, whilst it is possible to turbocharge any combustion engine to deliver huge amounts of power, if the components of that engine were never designed to cope with all the additional stresses incurred by the increased workload, it won't last long. It will quickly burn out or break down.

Have we brought our bees to this point?

Imagine life as a bee in California this spring — not glamorously buzzing around the flowers at the foot of the "Hollywood" sign but approaching the one million acres of Californian almond trees coming into bloom in one of 120 hives on the back of a truck after traveling two thousand bumpy miles.

Living in trees never felt like this, even during earthquakes. But once the forklift in the almond orchard has unloaded your hive, you fly out into a world of blossom. The soil and climate here make it the perfect place to grow almond trees — 80 percent of all the almonds eaten in the world call this home — and almost nothing else is grown.

Every intensive inch is almond. And every almond needs a bee to pollinate it into existence. For miles in every blooming direction it's All-You-Can-Eat nectar and pollen for the bees, and every year thirty billion of them are trucked in from all over the United States for this feast.

But the food is just one flavor, and it lasts just a few weeks.

Each individual flower is available for pollination for only five days. Once that blossom is fertilized by bees gathering pollen, the almond tree quickly switches its floral energy and resources to making almonds, and there is nothing for the bees to eat. No nectar or pollen for miles. The thirty billion bees, who could be forgiven for thinking they'd only just got here, must now be urgently trucked out again to somewhere else with flowers or they will starve to death in a food desert.

Like a touring stadium rock band, but on a much bigger scale, the bees are forklifted back onto giant trucks that head out on the highway and race them to their next exclusive gigs: cherries, apples, plums, avocados, pumpkins, blueberries, cranberries, sunflowers, and vegetables. It's estimated that one mouthful in three of everything we eat is dependent on insect pollination. And honey bees are the rock stars of pollinating insects, driven by diesel and heavy metal thunder.

But is the on-tour, rock star lifestyle one you would wish on your family?

Parents of small children know that when they start school they bring home all kinds of diseases that are generously shared in the classroom. Imagine how stressful a National Infant School Camping Month would be if entire families had to travel hundreds of miles to congregate in mass camps of similarly dislocated people — even if the food was good.

The thirty billion bees that traverse the United States every year travel on frames in hives still based on Langstroth's design. But the honey that design was intended to maximize has become less important to the road warrior industrial beekeepers that collect it.

Recently the commercial value of the pollination services their bees provide has become greater than the income from their honey. In cash terms, the honey is not so sweet.

So is Langstroth's honey-maximizing design still fit for purpose on the spreadsheets of all commercial beekeepers?

Small-scale beekeepers like me are not generating income from honey to feed their families, let alone satisfy shareholders. For us "hobby" beekeepers, many with a handful of hives or even just one, how important is maximum honey production? Does it trump everything else? And yet most of us still use the same hives and methods as the industrial giants. These hives have become synonymous with beekeeping. As if there is no other way.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Idle Beekeeper"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Bill Anderson.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction: Why Now?, 1,
Chapter 1: Idle Isn't Lazy, 7,
Chapter 2: Ideal Homes, 23,
Chapter 3: Follow the Honey, 41,
Chapter 4: A Warm Welcome, 59,
Chapter 5: Bee Chosen, 75,
Chapter 6: Sweet Secrets, 95,
Chapter 7: Bee Observant, 111,
Chapter 8: Bee Gentle, 133,
Chapter 9: Bee Productive, 153,
Chapter 10: Close to Home, 173,
Chapter 11: Spring Awakening, 191,
Chapter 12: Seize It!, 211,
Those Two Diary Dates at the Hive, 225,
Appendices, 227,

What People are Saying About This

Thomas D. Seeley

"The Idle Beekeeper is a beautifully written and wonderfully informative book on how to be a hobby beekeeper who is deeply respectful of his or her bees. The author, Bill Anderson, describes in detail how he succeeds as a hive keeper, not a beekeeper, for he knows that the bees keep themselves far better than he would ever do. The "idle" in its title refers not to laziness, but to the need to go into each hive on just two days each year, to add and remove a comb honey super. This is the book that I will recommend to novice backyard (or rooftop) bee enthusiasts."

Editorial Reviews

"The Idle Beekeeper is a beautifully written and wonderfully informative book on how to be a hobby beekeeper who is deeply respectful of his or her bees. The author, Bill Anderson, describes in detail how he succeeds as a hive keeper, not a beekeeper, for he knows that the bees keep themselves far better than he would ever do. The "idle" in its title refers not to laziness, but to the need to go into each hive on just two days each year, to add and remove a comb honey super. This is the book that I will recommend to novice backyard (or rooftop) bee enthusiasts."

Thomas D. Seeley

Laid back and user-friendly . . . Aspiring apiarists inspired by Anderson’s enthusiastic prose can skim the book for essential information

Natural History magazine

In this charming anecdotal how-to guide, Anderson, beekeeping columnist for The Idler magazine, lays out a low-maintenance approach to his hobby. . . . Readers keen on actually keeping bees themselves should find this information-packed book’s instructional component particularly useful, and Anderson’s fellow idlers will appreciate his laissez-faire personal ethos.

Publishers Weekly

"Anderson’s love of bees and beekeeping is apparent and creates an effective enticement for readers to become beekeepers. His minimalist approach provides an easy entry to a potentially intimidating pastime"

Booklist

In this charming anecdotal how-to guide, Anderson, beekeeping columnist for The Idler magazine, lays out a low-maintenance approach to his hobby. . . . Readers keen on actually keeping bees themselves should find this information-packed book’s instructional component particularly useful, and Anderson’s fellow idlers will appreciate his laissez-faire personal ethos.”—Publishers Weekly

"Anderson’s love of bees and beekeeping is apparent and creates an effective enticement for readers to become beekeepers. His minimalist approach provides an easy entry to a potentially intimidating pastime"—Booklist

"The Idle Beekeeper is a beautifully written and wonderfully informative book on how to be a hobby beekeeper who is deeply respectful of his or her bees. The author, Bill Anderson, describes in detail how he succeeds as a hive keeper, not a beekeeper, for he knows that the bees keep themselves far better than he would ever do. The "idle" in its title refers not to laziness, but to the need to go into each hive on just two days each year, to add and remove a comb honey super. This is the book that I will recommend to novice backyard (or rooftop) bee enthusiasts."
—Thomas D. Seeley, author of The Lives of Bees, Cornell University

“Laid back and user-friendly . . . Aspiring apiarists inspired by Anderson’s enthusiastic prose can skim the book for essential information”—Natural History magazine

From the Publisher

"Anderson’s love of bees and beekeeping is apparent and creates an effective enticement for readers to become beekeepers. His minimalist approach provides an easy entry to a potentially intimidating pastime"

Booklist