Bee Keeping Workshop 7th June 2015 - West Cork

Press Release: Natural Beekeeping Class

Liss Ard Estate, West Cork, Ireland, 7^th June 2015

A chemical free - Natural Beekeeping Class is being offered on Sunday 7^th June 2015 to introduce people to a gentler approach to Beekeeping at Liss Ard Estate in Skibbereen.

This is a perfect venue for the beekeeping class with plenty of space to roam around in their own natural habitat.

Max Danann & Trevor Danann both certified Beekeepers, are offering training in Natural Beekeeping (chemical free) through use of Top Bar Hives and their own hybrid mixed hives. The workshop is geared toward those with no prior experience in beekeeping but Beekeepers of any level are welcome.

April Danann will also be on hand to discuss her research project on Irish honey - The Honey Project - a microbiological review of honeys from around the world and their unique healing properties. 

Top Bar Hives are an alternative type of hive to commercial or national framed style hives currently in use. These are considered to closely resemble natural bee habitat and bees thrive in them. Many long time beekeepers are switching over to using some form of top bar hive. As well, our own mixed hive featuring framed Top Bars will be discussed.

During the class, you will be introduced to some time honoured traditions in beekeeping, learn about honey, equipment needs, initial start-up, bee health; including disease, pesticides, colony collapse disorder and how to keep a bee garden.

Students will be walked through a Top Bar Hive as well as other types – how they work, how to maintain a hive, and how to provide a family with a source of honey. There will be plenty of time for questions during this discussion style workshop.

Bees are everyone’s responsibility – at one time most back gardens had a hive or two – it’s time we came back to supporting these beautiful creatures – this class is a step forward in learning how to do just that.

Date; 7th June 2015

Place; Liss Ard Estate Skibbereen

Time; 1:30 to 4:30pm 

Cost: €55.00 (includes notes, light refreshments)
Contact: Max Danann 0873284762, email info@aprildanann.com or stop by our stall to book your place. Deposit required to hold a seat.

Various types of bee hives in our garden 

Top Bar Bee Keeping Class -- 30th March 2014 in Leap, West Cork

Top Bar Bee Keeping & Hives Introductory Class 30th March 2014

• Natural

• Sustainable

• Local

• Gentle 

Text or Ring: 0873284762

Many honey producers are placing nearly all of the current problems with the decline in local bee populations as well as some of the issues faced by agriculture today, on the way bees have been reared and kept during the past century. 

Basically, natural beekeeping involves less intervention (or none), using native species of bees, providing hives that suit bees more than humans, letting the bees do what they do best and not extracting all the honey in any one season. This system when combined with other natural practices such as organic farming becomes a conservation project and part of the solution to ensure thriving local populations of bees.

Top Bar Hives, as these have been used for well over a thousand years, are more bee friendly and are easy to maintain. They also appear to support the low intervention approach as they are sturdier, house varying populations of bees and allow the bees to produce varying types of comb. In the effort of sustainability, many honey producers believe that this low-tech approach “may mean accepting lower honey production per colony in return for healthier bees.”

Max and April Danann are Bee Keepers using only Top Bar Hives and a natural approach to apiary. 

o Top Bar Hives building courses available

o Custom made to fit frames

o Nucs can be ordered

o Courses and Training 

1:00 to 5:30 pm

€45 (adult), €25 children with adult attending

To book your place text or ring 087 328 4762

Please email, text or ring to order your Top Bar Bee Hives

Mob:  087 328 4762       email:  maxdanann@gmail.com

Top Bar Bee Keeping 30th March 2014, Leap

Top Bar Bees busy again

Its good to see the Bees back into the swing of things again, the last few weeks of sunshine was the boost that was needed to get them flying and foraging. Unfortunately, the rain has returned and settled in for the time being. This change in weather will affect the bees ability to build stores up for the winter so lets hope that the sunshine returns very soon.

I plan to show the Top Bar Bee Hives at the Skibbereen market again due to renewed interest from a number of aspiring beekeepers that I have talked to at the market. As always, I strive to improve the hive structure with each new hive that I build. The design originates in the Kenyan style of hive with some modifications to adapt to the Irish climate, such as ventilation to deal with excess dampness in the hive. I still prefer to use Larch timber for its durability and weather resistance.

 I am looking forward to seeing some more Top Bar Hives getting out into back gardens and fields. I set up a hive last week in a garden center and I am sure the bees will be very happy with the extended range of flowers and herbs to forage from.

All for now,
Max

The importance of reserves

Having enough to eat during the winter and early spring is an important topic for Bees. Bees store their food source because they do not hibernate during the cold months and must have enough food stores to last until they can get back to foraging when the weather turns.

It is important that there is a variety of honey within the hive, summer honey as well as honey stored from late autumn because honeys from different seasons and plants will store at different hardness. Ivy honey stores, gathered in the Autumn and Winter, is very hard and would be impossible to digest if not mixed with softer honeys.

I saw more activity from my hives in January than I have in March, this is due to a mix of very cold days with milder very wet days neither of which are good days for foraging. So that means the Bees are  continuing to eat last years honey until they can get out again. This honey from last year must be very good quality if they are going to survive. I cant expect the Bees to live on sugar water, because there is no nutritional value in this supposed honey replacer, so I don't give them any at all.

My own rule of thumb is about one third of the total stores gathered by the end of August could be harvested from the hive after a very good summer of fine weather. If the summer was very wet, then less or no honey would be harvested. This way I am not interfering with the only source of food and nutrition available. There will be some good weeks of foraging weather in the Autumn and this will boost their stores before the colder weather settles in.

We have all been, at one time or another, without any reserves of cash or cache and it is a frightening situation, so don't overtax your bees by taking more than they can afford to spare.

Natural Beekeeping for Children

Trevor Danann is instructing a Natural Beekeeping course for Children in Leap, West Cork on May 12. He is the ideal instructor as he is himself 12 years old and has been a certified Beekeeper for the last four years.

After attending and passing the FIBKA Gormanstown Beekeeping Summer School, he has participated in managing several Top Bar hives, as well as assisted in numerous hive builds, Bee installations, inspections and extractions.

Trevor has also been assisting in the previous 10 Natural Beekeeping Courses and is keen to present this course himself to an audience of children.

The course is designed to introduce children to the skills of Natural Beekeeping, covering topics such as: Bees, Honey, Commercial Beekeeping, Natural Beekeeping, Bee Health, Getting started and Research. The two hours duration of the course will include time outside observing Bees around the onsite hives.

Any younger children attending the course must be accompanied by an adult. The cost is €25 per child.

Trevor can be found at the Skibbereen Farmers Market every Saturday at our stall and ready to answer any queries on the Hives on display or Natural Beekeeping in general.

Regards,
Max

Natural Beekeeping Course

First of all, I would like to thank everybody that came out to the Natural Beekeeping course on Sunday, braving the cold blustery conditions. It was a productive day with loads of interesting questions. The group was a mix of experienced Beekeepers with several hives of their own as well as non-experienced but interested aspiring Beekeepers.

There is another Natural Beekeeping Course scheduled for April 14, taking place in Leap, West Cork. This course is a repeat of the March 10 Course and is intended to introduce Beekeeping through Natural methods rather than the usual Commercial program. The courses are open to Beekeepers of all levels and cover the following topics: Bees, Honey, Commercial Beekeeping, Natural Beekeeping, Bee Health, Disease, Poisons, Getting Started, Equipment, and Research. There are empty Top Bar hives on display and working Top Bar hives on the premises for viewing as well.

If there is enough interest expressed, I will run a Top Bar Hive building workshop sometime before the end of April. Any one interested can contact me at maxdanann@gmail.com

Regards,
Max

Building a Top Bar Bee Hive

One search for images of Top Bar Hives on the internet will show you how many variations that have been developed in different regions of the world. It is nice to see so many beekeepers building and using Top Bar Hives, the interest has certainly grown exponentially over the last few years.

I have found that proper ventilation is key in Ireland to deal with the excess of rain that is a year round constant. Also being able to fit National frames into the box ease the start up or transition to Top Bar Beekeeping. Most of the hives I build are made from solid Larch, which is a long lasting timber that stands up to the local weather without much need for coatings. My hives are also free of any toxins, glues, paint, sealers or preservatives to provide a toxin free environment, essential to the health of the bees.

Each hive I have built has been an improvement over the previous ones, applying what I learn from beekeeping into each new hive. I guess that I must be on the 6th or 7th generation of design adaptation resulting in a robust hive that will last for years, providing a safe, dry and clean space for the bees to live.

Beginning each new project is first spent visualizing what I what to make and then looking at the material at hand to see how it can be used efficiently. Sometimes it takes longer to plan the hive than to build it and a proper plan means less waste of material. I have added a few machines to my workshop since I first started building hives but basic hand tools are all that are really needed to build a hive from scratch.

I will be hosting a Top Bar Hive building workshop this spring and hope to see both old hands at beekeeping as well as aspiring beekeepers take part.

Regards,
Max

Thinking outside the box

The standard beehive, as most people know, is a square box. This box contains all the latest and greatest in beekeeping technology, but still just an ugly square box. No wonder then, the growing interest in a hive that does not look like a box or even a hive for that matter.

Top Bar Hives buck the trend of sticking with what everybody else is doing. They are so different from standard commercial hives that most beekeepers scoff at the very idea that they could even work. When in fact, its the Top Bar Hive that has been around for hundreds of years and the commercial hives that are the new and strange way of beekeeping.

The basis of the Top Bar Hive design lies in the simple hollowed out log, which was used by early beekeepers to create a copy of the naturally formed hives found in old hollow logs or hollow tree trunks. These are the same bees that get into your attic space and set up house. These bees are not looking for a box to move into, a box is not a natural shape. What the bees are looking for is a sheltered spot to build their hive without risk of disturbance.

Bees forced to live in a modern box are under stresses that include crowding, dampness, lack of proper ventilation, diseases, pests, toxins and removal of most of their precious winter stores. (The winter stores are then replaced with a sugar water that offers no nutrition) All these symptoms of box life result in a far weaker hive population that is easily susceptible to disease and parasites.

Its no wonder that people are looking for an alternative to the box and Top Bar Hives are the answer for a steadily growing collection of beekeepers that are looking for a better way of keeping bees healthy.

Top Bar Hives - Thinking outside the box

"Yeah, I like bees"

"Yeah, I like bees but my Mom, you know, is afraid"

This was a comment from a little girl I spoke to at the local Farmers Market in Skibbereen, where we have a stall and display a Top Bar Hive. I had asked her a question after seeing her looking at the hive and trying to sort out what it was, I gave her a flyer for our Natural Beekeeping for Children course and she was very pleased.

I feel it is very important to introduce beekeeping to children because it develops an understanding of the extremely important relationship between mankind and the natural world around us. A lot of people have created an illusion of separation and distance from things natural but its still there, just outside their door, or tap tap tapping on the window.

Creating an understanding of the natural systems that we depend on to survive, instills respect and consideration for all the many facets of nature that surround us.

The Natural Beekeeping for Children course is being presented by Trevor Danann (age 12) who has been a certified Beekeeper for the last four years. This course takes place in May in West Cork, Ireland.

Regards,
Max