Big Apple Apiary Beekeeping Apprenticeship

I am pleased to announce the creation of NYC's first FREE hands-on beekeeping apprenticeship. The program will open with room for 12 volunteer apprentices who will have the opportunity to gain experience in all aspects of beekeeping at our new 20 hive apiary in the Brooklyn Navy Yards.

Apprentices will learn and apply techniques including package hiving, basic inspections, small cell regression, queen breeding, and more!

Big Apple Apiary Beekeeping Apprenticeship

Brand new rooftop apiary seeks 12 volunteer beekeeping apprentices for the 2012 bee season (April through October or November). Working in small teams, our apprentices will gain hands-on experience in both basic and advanced beekeeping techniques, with a focus on treatment-free and organic beekeeping, and have the opportunity to pay it forward and mentor next year’s students.

About
This 20 hive apiary – poised on an expansive rooftop in the historic Brooklyn Navy Yard – will play host to NYC’s first hands-on beekeeping training program. Through education and outreach we aim to foster an inclusive community of new beekeepers and arm them with the tools they need to play an active role of the long-term sustainability of our city. The apiary is a joint project of Brooklyn Grange Farm and Timothy O’Neal of Borough Bees.

Benefits & Responsibilities
Our apprenticeship program is structured to give you all the first-hand knowledge you need to start a beehive of your own on your roof, community garden, or backyard. We will provide teams of two to three apprentices with several beehives, beekeeping equipment, basic safety gear, and close guidance through a season of hive management in a small group setting. Our goal is to give you the training you need to apply your knowledge independently by the end of the season, and leave prepared to be a mentor to new beekeepers next year. We’ll also arrange for a few field trips and special guests throughout the season to welcome you into the greater beekeeping community in New York City and beyond.

Apprentices will work directly with experienced beekeepers and gain hands-on experience that covers the gamut of beekeeping tasks: basic hive inspections, pest identification and management, swarm prevention, requeening, combining and splitting hives, and honey harvesting. You’ll also learn about more advanced techniques like cell size regression, queen breeding, and managing top-bar colonies.

Apprentices are required to devote an average of 3-4 weekend hours per week to the maintenance of their hives. On a typical weekend the instructor will give a quick, hands-on lesson (30-60min) using a demonstration hive on what to look out for at that point in the season, at which point apprentices will break into small teams to inspect their own hives under supervision from the instructor. Teams are responsible for maintaining close records of hive conditions and manipulations. Some heavy lifting required, must be able to climb 4 flights of stairs and work in all weather.

Who We’re Looking For
This is not a beekeeping 101 course; ideal candidates will be able to demonstrate some degree of knowledge, but hands-on experience isn’t necessary. We’re a brand-new program so we need people with a sense of humor, patience, and a willingness to help us find ways to improve as we go!

Benefits
In addition to the valuable hands-on training using provided equipment, we may be able to provide starter bee colonies to apprentices who successfully complete the whole program, to start their own hives next year. Students will get a portion of the honey harvest - but be aware that first-year hives sometimes produce little or no harvestable honey. This is a fantastic opportunity for anyone who’s interested in getting started managing their own bees and giving back to the larger community.

How to Apply
Please respond to bigappleapiary@gmail.com no later than March 21st with an email telling us about yourself and your interest in the apprenticeship. We will be reviewing applications as they are received. No resume necessary, creative applications encouraged.

We encourage teams of two to three to apply together. Those who do not apply in teams will be paired with other selected applicants. Youth, members of under-served communities, and people from diverse backgrounds are encouraged to apply.

AWESOME.

APPLY!

DO IT!

NOW!

http://www.boroughbees.com/2012/03/wanna-be-my-apprentice.html

Check out Meg on Made by Hand!

Made by Hand- The Beekeeper

Beekeeping Events!

Let's get some cross pollination up in this business!

This month and next, there are THREE different Beekeeping 101 courses taught by Backwards Beekeepers! You just have to choose your location: Carroll Gardens, Bushwick, or Midtown Manhattan!

Plus, a FREE workshop on Wax Processing at the Brooklyn Brainery. YES!

For details, check out the post on my other blog here: http://www.boroughbees.com/2012/02/weekly-101-22112.html

Packages: why we buy them and what we're doing to avoid further dependence on them.

A package of bees is exactly what it sounds like. A shoebox-sized screened container with 3 pounds of bees, a mated queen and can of syrup enclosed inside for feeding. These bees are transported from the American south to parts all over the country for new beekeepers to get a fresh start or for more experienced beekeepers to expand or replace dead hives.

Packages, while certainly not a natural way to get bees, are often the only way many of us in cooler climates can acquire them. Swarms, the most preferable method of procuring bees, are a rare occurrence around these parts and are often accompanied with a battle over who gets to take the swarm home.

Though we wish we had access to the number of swarms our founding counterparts in Los Angeles have, we simply do not. Not even close. If we want to have bees at all, we have to bring them up from the south. It's just the way it is...for now. It is our hope that by giving our bees a chance to adapt to a no-treatment, natural cell environment, we'll end up with opportunities to propagate bees with splits and by retrieving swarms from traps that we plan to set up near known apiaries. It's a means to an end. We seek bee-independence and with some effort we believe that we can have it.

It bears clarifying why some of us (though not all of us) bristle at the thought of bringing in bees. For some of us, it feels so far removed from the way bees propagate in nature. Bees swarm with their queen--a proven viable matriarch. Packages come with a recently mated queen that may or may not be viable...and she's not usually related in any way. In some cases the bees will sooner kill this foreign strange-smelling bee than accept her as their new mother. I can't say I blame them. It seems like such a confusing and stressful thing to go through; being shaken into a box and shipped off many miles from home.

Another unfortunate aspect to bringing bees up from more temperate climates is that the bees aren't acclimated to our region. They are often bred to brood year round so that the bees can be split up to make more packages. They eat a lot, often leading to starvation during cold winters...that is if they even survive the cold. Some just don't have what it takes to endure. Some bees will adapt well to their new conditions. When that happens, it's a wonderful thing to witness. Bees are more resilient than you think sometimes. There are still quite a few that don't adapt, leaving beekeepers to continue buying in bees each season. It's an inefficient cycle. One that we aspire to become less dependent on.

I want to take a moment to say that in spite of all of these negatives, I personally think that these package operations are helping to keep bee populations steady. They are doing all they can to keep sending bees out into the world to do the work they are so adept at. It's really up to beekeepers to take what we can get and improve upon it. If we want bees that we can let bee, they might just need a little help from us.

That's what our goal is. We want to take the bees that we have access to and gently help them to adapt and flourish under more natural conditions. This season we'll be starting a small breeding program in conjunction with the fine folks at Brooklyn Grange where we'll be raising queens adapted from winter hardy, regional genetics, utilizing techniques that mimic natural reproductive behavior.

We've ordered a small number of Russian and Italian packages this season and with each we're offering a voucher for a locally-raised and mated queen for those who need it. If you are interested, please email the club and we'll get you set up.

If you have any insight or opinions regarding packages or other methods of procuring bees, please feel free to share. We'd love to hear what you think!

An Online Urban Beekeeping Workshop! (Repost)

From Meg's blog Brooklyn Homesteader:

I've been getting some requests to do online workshops for some of my fine readers that live outside of NYC so I've finally taken a hint!

My first web class will be on Sunday, January the 22nd as part of a three-session, 9 hour beekeeping intensive. It's going to be as robust and informative as the classes I teach in person here in the city, only with this class you can show up in your pajamas. Hell! Take the class naked for all I care!

In all seriousness though, we'll cover all the basics of beekeeping: honeybee anatomy and behavior, types of hives, urban forage, acquiring bees, hive management, honey harvesting, pests and diseases and winter management. It's going to be a lot of information, but the goal is to adequately visually demonstrate everything you need to know to get started with bees this spring.

My focus will be on treatment-free and passive pest and disease management but we will discuss other forms of treatment and discuss the pros and cons of utilizing them.

Check out the Eventbrite page for the class HERE!

Beekeeping 101

I'm teaching another section of my Beekeeping 101 course at the Brooklyn Brainery starting Tuesday, January 10th.

There's an old saying that I like: Two beekeepers, three opinions.

Beekeeping as an art and a science has many schools of thought and even more opinions. In this class, I will teach you the basics of beekeeping with both bee behavior and science as a foundation. Together, we will clear a path through all the obstacles and opinions while laying the groundwork for understanding the apiary essentials.

With a firm grasp of good beekeeping practices and the science behind them, I hope that you will leave this class excited and able to further explore this amazing hobby and enjoy it as much as I do.

A few things we'll learn about:

-Matriarchs and Regicide: Power Struggles, Murder, and Bee Social Structure
-Eww: Where Honey Comes From and A Tasty Taste Test
-Bee Still My Aching Back: Hive Inspections and Maintenance
-Bees in The Boroughs: The Travails of Urban Beekeeping

(Class size: around 20)

Sign up here: http://brooklynbrainery.com/courses/beekeeping-101 - $50

A repost from our beekeeper friend in Calgary, Eliese Watson

This Business of Bees: Livestock or Sacrosanct?

Over a delicious dinner at Riva and Andrew Mackie’s (Riva’s EcoStore Calgary) house this past week, Riva asked me a question: Why is it important to get bees from a local source? Does it matter where you get your bees from? I realized in that moment that I had not shared publicly my feelings on this subject, and really, my passion for this subject forms the base of the mandate of A.B.C. So, better served late then not at all, here is what I know, and what I believe.

This Business of Bees: Livestock or Sacrosanct?

When you enter a conversation about honeybees with a typical beekeeper, the immediate response will be something like “Those Ontario Buckfast Queens sure know how to produce” or “The A.I Hygenic Queens work great”, or “If you import those Hawaiians, you will be sure to get an early start and a heavy brood nest by March.” But what does all of this mean? The key here is to not become befuddled by what bees they are talking about, but by the terminology that is being used. Words like production, A.I (artificial insemination), import; these are all terms used in commercial globalized agriculture. From dairy cattle to corn production, it is a part of our industrialized vocabulary of genetic control. The real revolution in agriculture began with the sweet pea and Gregor Mendel. From then forward the human species has invested time and money in the effort to understand, experiment, and then manipulate the genetics of our food supply. This has propelled our diversified food systems to a seemingly efficient, immediate output, and monized ‘product’. As the 21^st century has slid quickly in to a period of drought, flooding, famine, obesity, financial inequality, economic collapse, we are realizing the true costs of industrialized convenience: its killing us, and not as slowly as we thought.

So you ask, what does this have to do with bees? It has EVERYTHING to do with bees. Stories about the disappearing honeybee populations smeared across websites, front pages, and television screens, the common concern is: what is this doing to the commercial farmers’livelihood? What have researchers found out? What is the disease causing this? Can they find a cure in time? This is assuming that the symptoms, the actual bees flying away, are the problem. Suppress the symptoms and the tenets of industrial agriculture, immediate output, immediate productivity, can be realized. But what about bees in the long term? How are the bees going to do in the next 100+ years? Are they going to become stronger or weaker by thecure? How about humans, are we going to become stronger or weaker by finding these sorts of cures?

Enter urban beekeeping. You may not be familiar with why you are drawn to keeping bees, it could just come to you naturally, a yearning to experience the world of honeybees in your own backyard. But you and I know that it is deeper than that, it is a chance to connect with organisms that practice real altruism, real compassion and full selflessness. The advent of urban beekeeping makes me think of the following quote:

“More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in man; cries out for universal brotherhood; for the unity of us all.” – Sir. Charles Chaplin, The Great Dictator

I not only feel that by working with bees you are connecting with the true character of human nature in yourself, the need of a community and a connection to something outside of yourself, without expectation, failure, or judgement. When you see the bees care for one another without discrimination it makes you, the beekeeper, become a member of a hive community. Here are my beliefs on why urban beekeeping is so essential to our planet. It is not that we are going to save the bees, the bees, if I have learned anything from them, are going to save themselves if we let them. Urban beekeeping is a symptom of something far greater than the bees, it is an act of intuitive solidarity and awareness that the industrial system cannot and will not protect us or the bees: it physically cannot, it was not designed to. We as a human species are beginning to understand the importance of diversity and the uniqueness of local (in native speciation, distribution, or behaviours) and we are becoming more aware of what we can do on a local scale, in contrast to the globalized system that we are all active participants and victims of.

Back to the question: Does it matter where you get your bees from? Yes and no, always and never. Here in Calgary Alberta, we source our bees from Bill Stagg of Sweet Acre Apiaries in Sorrento BC, all of his bees are from openly mated queens and the bees you get come with their parent queen (which is uncommon by the way, many sellers of nucs/splits will send you bees with a foreign queen recently accepted, meaning that the bees born 21 days later are not sisters of the bees you have grown to love in the past 21 days; think of it as colonial despotism). This means that our bees have no stock label, we do not know their genetic lineage, and we do not know lab results on their hygienic behaviour. What we do know is that they are survivors; they are as genetically diverse as nature has intended. In an industrial mind set, this is risky. The bees may not have the genetic predisposition for early broodproduction, the hives honey yields might be lower than expected, and the bees have not beenbred to suppress the urge to swarm. These are all the industrial constraints that urban beekeeping, intuitively and actively, is rebelling against. So, is it better to get bees that arebred in a more natural way? A professor of mine once told me that 90% of work in research is finding the right question, not the research itself. So to me, this is the wrong question because it still implies that humans are a part of the equation in ensuring honeybee survival rates. I think that we need to change the human participation in beekeeping from an active to passive role. The genetic archetype of a colony can, within a single short Alberta summer, change up to 3-4 times. This means that if the colony is not happy with itself (the hives output, responses to disease, brood laying patterns) it will in effect requeen itself and allow the new queen to mate with local genetics, and try again. So for all of the research and investment the industrial systems attempts in controlling honeybee genetics, the bees still strive to take care of themselves. This is why honeybees are still wild at heart; even while being enslaved to our industrial food systems, they rebel and do what they need to do to care for each other and fix our mistakes.

So, get your bees from where you get them, but like all things, it is better to be closer to your source (in this case, your beekeeper) because it decreases your economic support for the industrial complex. But, like rescue dogs from puppy mills, you can get your bees from a commercial supplier overseas, artificially inseminated, bred to genetic controls mandated by our industrial complexes, but offer healthy and happy homes for them, offer them a chance to save themselves. In the end, we are all victim to natures ways, natural selection and environmental whiplash, whether you are a product of industrialization or you are homespun. This is because we are a part of nature. It is our ability to unite as a community, a tribe, a collective as bees have done for millennia, that will allow us to thrive, grow, breathe, and live another day. So, why keep bees? You tell me. I just know that when I work with bees, watch them, see them care for their young and nurture their queen, my heart becomes lighter and I feel a sense of hope for all of us- human beings and all living things. We are what we relinquish to nature.

By Eliese Watson

Founder of A.B.C Apiaries and Bees for Communities

www.backyardbees.ca