Yes, it’s supposed to look like that

Drive down our road and you might think we foreclosed on the place. Our neighbors’ yards look like they manage golf courses for a living. Ours looks like a meadow that got away from us, and that’s exactly the point.

Mowed lawn feeds almost nothing. Tall grass, wildflowers, brush, and young native trees feed and shelter hundreds of kinds of insects, birds, and animals. We mow paths so we can walk through it and let the rest do its job.

Trees feed bees better than flowers

Most people picture bees on a flower bed, but some of the best bee food in Georgia grows on trees and shrubs. A single mature tree can open thousands of blooms at once, far more than a garden bed can offer. So we’ve focused on planting native trees and shrubs: the kinds of plants Georgia bees evolved with, that bloom at different times through the year, and that need no watering or spraying once they’re established.

A few favorites on the farm: tulip poplar, one of the best bee trees in Georgia, plus redbuds, willows, fringe trees, buttonbush, and American beautyberry.

A confession: we also have crape myrtles, Bradford pears, and privet. Like everyone else, we planted them before we knew any better. Now we know, and we’re working on it.

Honey bees aren’t endangered. Native bees are.

Honey bees are managed livestock, brought here from Europe in the 1600s. They aren’t at risk of disappearing. Native bees are a different story. North America has about 4,000 native bee species, many in decline, and some, like the rusty patched bumble bee, are now federally endangered.

Too many honey bee hives in one place can crowd native bees out of the food they need. That’s why we keep our apiary small, never more than one or two hives per acre, and why we count pollinators every month. The counts tell us how the whole community is doing, not just our honey bees.

How we support native bees

• Bare ground: most native bees nest in the soil, so we leave sunny, unmulched patches undisturbed.
• Standing stems and dead wood: many others nest in hollow stems and old wood, so we leave them standing through winter.
• Brush piles and leaf litter: shelter for overwintering bees, butterflies, and other insects.
• No pesticides: nothing sprayed on the property, ever.
• Native plants: blooms from early spring through late fall so there’s always something to eat.

Most honey bee colonies in the U.S. are treated several times a year for Varroa mites. Treatment keeps a colony alive, but it also keeps alive bees that could never cope with mites on their own. We take the other path.

What treatment-free means here

We do not use synthetic miticides, organic-acid or essential-oil mite treatments, or antibiotics in our hives. The colonies manage their own mites, and we manage the colonies.

Why it matters

Mites and bees are locked in an arms race. When every colony is treated, bees stop being selected for the traits that fight mites: grooming, hygienic behavior, and breaks in brood rearing. Treatment-free beekeeping lets those traits rise to the top, generation after generation.

Where the “rules” came from

Much of what beginners are taught as the rules of beekeeping (stop swarms at all costs, requeen often, feed to stimulate growth, push for big colonies and big harvests) was developed for commercial operations running thousands of hives for pollination contracts and honey sales. In that world, those practices make sense. Somewhere along the way, though, industrial necessity became the default for everyone, even a backyard keeper with two hives.

It may have shaped the bees, too. Decades of breeding for low swarming, fast spring buildup, and big honey crops pushed aside traits that help colonies survive on their own: thrift through winter, adaptation to local conditions, and the natural urge to swarm.

Treatment-free beekeeping asks a different question. Not “how much can these bees produce for us?” but “what do they need to thrive as bees?” Observation before control. Understanding before production.

“There is a difference between helping bees… and constantly pushing them.”Evangelia Mavridis, The Beekeeping Perspective, whose writing inspired this section

Cleaner wax and honey

Many mite treatments build up in beeswax over time. Our combs are built fresh by the bees and never exposed to treatments, which matters for the brood raised in them and for any wax we offer someday.

It isn't hands-off

Some colonies will fail. We expect that, and we’ll learn from it. Colonies that thrive will become the mothers of our splits and queens. Colonies that struggle will be requeened or combined. Over time the whole apiary should lean toward bees that do well in Walton County without help.

A Langstroth hive is a stack of boxes filled with frames. A top bar hive is one long box with wooden bars across the top. Each bar holds a single comb the bees build themselves, and the colony expands along the length of the hive.

What to plan for with a top bar hive

• New comb full of honey is soft. Hold it upright and never tip it flat.
• Check early that combs are straight so they don't cross bars.
• A horizontal hive fills up fast in spring, so swarm management matters.
• Top bars don't fit Langstroth frames. Start with bees already on top bar comb.

Timing shifts a week or two with the weather, but this is the rhythm our bees follow in the Georgia Piedmont.

A honey bee colony works like a single animal made of thousands of bees. Each bee has a job, and the jobs change as she ages.

Three kinds of bees

• Queen. The only fertile female. She lays all the eggs, up to 1,500 a day at the spring peak, and her scent holds the colony together.
• Workers. Females that can't mate. They do everything else: clean, nurse, build comb, guard, and forage.
• Drones. The males. Their only job is to mate with queens from other colonies. Workers push them out in the fall.

Egg to adult

Every bee starts as an egg that hatches in 3 days. The time to adulthood depends on the caste.

A worker's career

Young workers stay inside. They clean cells, feed larvae, make wax, and build comb. Around three weeks old they start guarding the entrance, and then they spend the rest of their short lives foraging for nectar, pollen, water, and propolis.

How bees communicate

Foragers do a waggle dance on the comb to tell others where food is. The angle of the dance points to the food relative to the sun, and the length of the waggle tells the distance. Bees also talk through scent: the queen's pheromones, alarm scent from guards, and the Nasonov scent that calls bees home.

Comb

Workers make wax from glands on the underside of the abdomen and shape it into six-sided cells. In natural comb the bees build smaller cells for workers and larger ones for drones, and they decide how much of each the colony needs.

Swarming

Swarming is how a colony reproduces. The old queen leaves with about half the bees, and the colony left behind raises a new queen. The swarm hangs in a cluster, its bivouac, while scouts search for a new home. That's the moment a Russian scion or a swarm trap is made for.

People have gathered honey for as long as there have been people. Keeping bees in a box we can open is a much newer idea.

Honey hunters

A rock painting in the Cuevas de la Araña in Spain, roughly 8,000 years old, shows a person climbing to raid a wild nest. Ancient Egyptians kept bees in long clay pipe hives laid on their sides, an early horizontal hive.

Bees come to America

Honey bees aren't native to the Americas. English colonists brought them to Virginia in 1622, and they spread west ahead of the settlers. In the Southern mountains, people kept bees in sections of hollow black gum trees. That's why Georgians still call a hive a bee gum.

Bee space and the Langstroth hive

In 1851, Reverend Lorenzo Langstroth noticed that bees leave a gap of about 3/8 inch between surfaces and fill anything smaller with propolis or bigger with comb. He used that "bee space" to design hives with removable frames, patented in 1852. Most beekeepers in the U.S. still use his design.

The modern top bar hive

Hives with bars across the top go back to ancient Greece. The sloped-wall top bar hive we use today was developed in Kenya in the 1970s as a hive anyone could build cheaply from local materials.

Mites and mite-resistant bees

The Varroa mite reached the United States in 1987 and changed beekeeping overnight. Wild colonies died off, and most beekeepers began treating. In 1997 the USDA imported honey bees from the Primorsky region of far-eastern Russia, where bees had lived alongside Varroa for about 150 years. After testing, those Russian bees were released to beekeepers in 2000.

Every hive is a box that gives bees a dry, dark cavity to build in. The differences are in how the comb is held and how the hive grows.

Top bar hive

One long horizontal box with bars across the top. The bees hang one natural comb from each bar. The Kenyan style has sloped sides, which keeps combs from attaching to the walls. The Tanzanian style has straight sides. This is what we use at Serenity Now.

Langstroth hive

The standard American hive. Stacked boxes hold removable frames, usually with foundation. It's built for honey production and works with lots of commercial equipment, but full boxes are heavy.

Warré hive

A vertical stack of small boxes with top bars instead of frames. New boxes go on the bottom, so the bees build downward the way they would in a tree.

Layens hive

A long horizontal hive like a top bar, but with tall, deep frames. It's popular with natural beekeepers who want horizontal management with framed comb.

Skeps and bee gums

Woven straw skeps and hollow log gums are part of beekeeping history. Their combs can't be removed and inspected, so they're mostly kept today for display or tradition.

Compare top bar and Langstroth side by side

A strong colony defends itself well. Most pest problems start when a colony is weak, queenless, or has more space than it can guard.

Varroa mites

The biggest threat to honey bees worldwide. Mites feed on developing bees and spread viruses like deformed wing virus. Treatment-free keepers don't treat, but they still watch mite levels and raise new colonies only from bees that keep mites in check.

Small hive beetles

A serious pest in the Southeast. Beetle larvae tunnel through comb and ruin honey. Keep colonies strong, give hives morning sun, avoid giving bees more space than they can patrol, and use beetle traps if needed.

Wax moths

Moth larvae eat comb, especially in weak colonies and in empty comb you've stored. A strong colony removes them on its own.

Brood diseases

• American foulbrood: a bacterial disease with sunken, greasy cappings and a foul smell. It's very contagious, and its spores last for decades. If you suspect it, contact the Georgia Department of Agriculture's apiary program.
• European foulbrood: twisted, discolored larvae, often during stress.
• Chalkbrood: larvae turn into white, chalky mummies, often in damp, cool spring weather. Strong colonies usually clear it on their own.

Critters

Ants, yellow jackets robbing in late summer, mice moving in for winter, and skunks and raccoons scratching at the entrance at night. In the north Georgia mountains, black bears are a real risk. A hive on legs, a reduced entrance, and an electric fence where bears live handle most of these.

Bees do best on what they make themselves. Our goal is to leave enough honey that feeding is the exception, not the routine.

Honey first

Honey and pollen give bees the nutrition they evolved on. Before winter, a colony needs plenty of capped honey on the combs next to its cluster. Harvest only what's left over after that.

When to feed anyway

• A newly hived swarm with no comb, especially during a nectar dearth
• A colony that's light going into winter
• A colony that is starving, at any time of year

What to feed

• 1:1 sugar syrup (equal parts sugar and water by weight) in spring helps bees build comb.
• 2:1 syrup (two parts sugar to one part water) in fall helps them store food for winter.
• Use plain white cane sugar. Brown sugar, raw sugar, and molasses can make bees sick.
• Never feed store-bought honey. It can carry American foulbrood spores.

Feed without starting a robbing war

Feed inside the hive, never in an open bucket in the yard. In a top bar hive, put the feeder behind the follower board so only that colony can reach it. A Boardman feeder set inside the hive works great for this. Reduce the entrance while you feed, and don't spill syrup near the hives.

Water and forage

Bees need water every day, especially in a Georgia summer. A birdbath or shallow pan with stones or floating corks for landing works well. Planting forage like clover, goldenrod, asters, and native wildflowers is the best long-term feeding plan of all.

It’s easy to buy every fun new tool in the catalog. Here’s what you actually need to get started. It’s exactly what I started with.

1. A full bee suit. Always.

Never check your bees without one. I don’t care what you saw on YouTube. Bee stings hurt, and in rare cases they can be fatal for people with a severe allergy. A full suit with a veil and gloves lets you work calmly, and calm hands make for calm bees.

2. A hive tool

A simple metal pry bar for loosening top bars that the bees have glued down with propolis. You’ll use it every single time you open a hive.

3. A Boardman feeder

An inexpensive feeder that holds a jar of sugar syrup. You won’t need it often (honey is the best food), but it’s good to have on hand for a new swarm or a hungry colony. I use mine inside the hive, behind the follower board, where robbers can’t get to it, and it works great. See Feeding for when to use it.

4. A robbing screen

A screen that fits over the entrance and confuses robber bees while your own bees find their way in. Especially handy during Georgia’s late-summer dearth, and anytime you’re feeding.

What about a smoker?

Honestly? I still don’t own one. My Apis Solis works about half the time. (LOL.) Many beekeepers swear by smoke, and it can help, but slow, gentle movements and a good suit go a long way.

What can wait

Extractors, bottling gear, and wax-processing equipment. I’m still learning my bees and haven’t gotten to harvest and products yet, so I haven’t invested in any of it, and you don’t need to either. Buy it when you have a surplus to harvest.

There’s a beehive in the corner of our house, right next to a comfy chair. It’s my favorite beekeeping tool, and I learn something every time I lift the blanket.

How it works

An observation hive is a tall, narrow hive with glass sides. Ours sits by a window, and a clear tube runs from the hive through the window to the outside, so the bees come and go on their own while the colony lives indoors. A blanket stays over the glass most of the time to keep the hive dark, the way bees like it in a hollow tree. When I want to visit, I just lift a corner.

What you can watch

• Bees building natural comb, cell by cell
• Foragers coming home with pollen in every color
• The waggle dance, as foragers tell their sisters where the flowers are
• The queen laying and the workers caring for brood
• How the colony changes with the weather and the seasons

All without a suit, without smoke, and without opening a single hive.

Why I recommend one for new beekeepers

The hardest part of being new is not knowing what “normal” looks like. An observation hive shows you, every day, up close. When you open your outdoor hives, you’ll recognize what you’re seeing, and you’ll be calmer and more confident because of it. It’s also the best way I know to share bees with family and friends, safely behind glass.

A few tips

• Keep it covered when you’re not watching. Bees prefer the dark.
• Watch the sun. A window spot is great, but don’t let strong afternoon sun bake the glass.
• Plan for growth. An observation hive is small, and a strong colony can outgrow it. Have a plan for moving bees into an outdoor hive when it gets crowded.

This is the story of how I installed bees into my observation hive, and how I did literally everything wrong. If it saves one new beekeeper from a night like mine, it was worth it.

What I read

I’d read that bees don’t fly at night, and that they can’t see red light. So I made a plan. I brought home a swarm trap I’d been keeping at a foster yard, set it in my garage with the door down, and waited until dark. Then I turned on a red light and opened it up.

What actually happened

Those bees found me just fine.

It took me from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. to load that hive. I loaded it all wrong. I squished bees. It was absolute chaos. At one point I was spinning around in the evergreen trees like a car wash, trying to get angry bees off of me. I sprayed myself with the water hose, right through my bee suit. I had at least two panic attacks.

I got stung for the first time that night, three times, right through my suit. And there was nothing I could do about it, because I had hundreds of angry bees on my veil. I couldn’t even see through them.

My mentor told me afterward that nights like that are when you either become a beekeeper or you quit. I’m still here.

What I should have done

Place the swarm trap beneath my second-story window and load the observation hive in the afternoon, in daylight, while the bees are calm and busy. Leave it there until evening so the foragers can find their way in. Then close it up and carry it inside to the bedroom.

That’s it. It would have been so easy.