BEE-L Archives

Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology

BEE-L@COMMUNITY.LSOFT.COM

Options: Use Monospaced Font
Show Text Part by Default
Show All Mail Headers

Message: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]
Topic: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]
Author: [<< First] [< Prev] [Next >] [Last >>]

Print Reply
Subject:
From:
"E.t. Ash" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Thu, 6 Oct 2016 07:35:48 -0400
Content-Type:
text/plain
Parts/Attachments:
text/plain (28 lines)
Ruth Askren writes...  

I tell the kids that honeybees need the things that all animals need: fresh water to drink, the right kinds of food to eat, and enough room to fly around freely. There are bees everywhere here in LA so it's easy to point out that our city is a great place for honeybees to live. 

With adults I often bring up the idea that factory style farming has some big drawbacks, for cattle as well as for bees. But it won't cause the extinction of cattle any more than it will for bees. New breeds will be bred to combat the weaknesses of the bottlenecked genetic lines, and farmers will keep farming. Bees will continue doing what they do and we humans will get better at how we interface with them.

my comments..
I have over the past dozen years or so done a good deal of educational work.  Some of this I have done for the fun of it and for some I charge quite a large sum of money.  The audience is quite varied from the folks at the bee school in Brenham, Texas to the students at the Texas A&M Bee lab to individual hands on teaching of some quite well healed executives (typically lawyer and medical doctor types).

1) For new beekeepers I quite frequently tell them to first off to write down the primary PURPOSE as to why they want to rear bees and to hang this on the wall.  Over time this purpose may change and when it does write this down so that after some time you can visually consider what kind of progress you are making and if you want to alter you purpose and your reason for doing so.  This process simply allows to to monitor if you are keeping on tract with your stated intentions.

2) Next many new folks will ask can they maintain bees without the use of chemicals.  This is a difficult question to navigate since folks will quite often only hear what they want to and filter out any information that does not conform to their world view (politics anyone?).  My short answer to this is 'I do'.... but this definitely does not mean I think they should.  There is a steep learning curve all new beekeeper will have to endure.  This hill is not insurmountable and you don't need to be a rocket scientist to overcome this obstacle.  An open and flexible mind set and a lot of perseverance are essential and you cannot learn to overcome the many problems of beekeeping in a book.  The book stuff is good but it is even better when you apply this understanding via practice.  If you (ie the newcomer) enjoys a challenge then beekeeping is something they might wish to consider.

3) Expectation... quite often I get the idea that some folks believe that my bees never die or I never have an unresolved problem in beekeeping.  Especially with the the younger crowd the first thing I like to show them is the pile of dead out I collect during the season.  I do this to let them know directly that if you do rear bees that some will perish and this is ok and should be expected.  At times I have tried to reset expectation of a small group of folks (normally mid age folks) that seem to want to be commercial but much of this crowd already know so much that you can give up on teaching these folks anything.

I did enjoy your comments Ruth Askren....     

       



 

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html

ATOM RSS1 RSS2