What is 'Natural Beekeeping'?

And you could also ask - what is 'unnatural' about conventional beekeeping?

Conventional beekeeping in Langstroth (or similar) hives with frames and wax foundation is mostly about honey yields, while 'natural beekeepers' put the focus more on the health of the bees. We believe that it is more important to provide bees with a place to live that gives them the freedom to build their comb more-or-less as they please, than to push them to produce the maximum amount of honey.

Natural beekeepers tend to use 'top bar hives', which allow bees to build comb according to their own design. Conventional hives use wax 'foundation', that forces bees to build cells of one size and artificially represses their need to build larger 'drone' cells.

But natural beekeeping is not simply a return to the old days of skeps, when colonies were often destroyed at the end of a season. We have taken the best of the old ways and looked at the whole subject from a new angle: that of helping bees find their own ways of solving the problems of survival in the 21st century. This is a world where much of the agriculture is toxic to bees: pesticides are almost universal and the new types of systemic pesticide are lethal in tiny doses.

We don't claim to have all the answers, but we have a lot of questions about how bees have been kept for the last 150 years. We hope you will join us in our quest to help the bees find their own answers.

Further reading

Find out more about top bar hives

Download free instructions - How to Build a Top Bar Hive

Read - The Barefoot Beekeeper - a primer for top bar beekeeping

Read - How to Start Beekeeping For Free - to get an idea of what is involved

Read - So You Want to Keep Bees?

Get free support on the Natural Beekeeping Forum

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