ISBN: 9781933392080 Year Added to Catalog: 2007 Book Format: Paperback Book Art: Photographs and Illustrations Number of Pages: 272 pages Book Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Old ISBN: 1933392088 Release Date: June 13, 2007 Web Product ID: 164
Richard Spiegel visits with Ross Conrad - A Kindred Bee Soul
Volcano Island Honey Company, LLC
July 14, 2010
Richard Spiegel, Owner of Volcano Island Honey Co, just got back from a trip to the East Coast to visit family, friends, and bees. He went to Vermont and stopped in for a visit with Ross Conrad, Owner of Dancing Bee Gardens and author of Natural Beekeeping, which has been a source of inspiration for beekeepers at Volcano Island Honey for years.
Richard found that he and Ross share a similar philosophy when it comes to beekeeping and the role of bees on the earth. Volcano Island Honey produces an organic, artisan honey that requires a high degree of attunement with the cycles of the bees. In order to maintain a close relationship with the bees Richard has kept the business intentionally small, managing between 130-150 hives. Most commercial beekeepers manage thousands of hives. Speaking to the organic approach in Natural Beekeeping, Ross Conrad says, “This emphasis on quality over quantity is perhaps the defining notion of the organic agricultural movement.”
A focus on quality over quantity has made Volcano Island Honey the company that it is. VIHC always leaves enough honey for the bees, so that the hive can maintain itself in the way that nature intended. Many large commercial apiaries take all of the honey from the bees and then feed the bees sugar- not their natural food! VIHC also uses “bee escapes” as a less invasive and non-violent way to vacate bees from the hive before harvesting. This is more labor intensive, but it is more gentle to the bees and does not kill bees. VIHC respects the bees as intelligent beings and teachers, instead of as a tool for making honey and money. We also make our own wax foundation, using our own beeswax to avoid beeswax from other sources that may be contaminated by toxins & chemicals.
Richard sees the bees as teachers- even after working closely with the bees for over 30 years he continues to learn lessons from the bees. Bees teach us many things about cooperative society and environmental sustainability. Beekeeping is an agricultural endeavor that has a positive environmental footprint. The bees give back and make the environment in which they live a better place. Not only do they share their incredible gifts of honey and wax, but they also help pollinate the area and increase the agricultural output of the trees and plants. Quoting Ross from Natural Beekeeping, “The honey bee inspires me to work into my daily life this lesson: That we should give something back and improve upon things, thus making the world a better place.” VIHC strives to make the world a better place through conscious management of every aspect of the business. However, even with all of this striving, it is very hard to create a positive environmental impact while running a business. The activities of the bees are an environmental plus, but the impact of the human activities of packaging and shipping are hard to avoid and hard to mitigate. “It is easy to talk about being a sustainable business, but it is very hard to live these things, try as we might,” says Richard Spiegel.
Bees are truly one of the natural wonders of the world- they make honey and wax- two things that humans have found very useful for thousands of years. Humans have figured out how to make wax from petroleum (yuck! beeswax candles are superior in every way!) but not to make honey. “Honey is something so precious and special; even with our highly developed technological sciences, we humans still have not been able to duplicate the efforts of the simple honey bee and create the same substance from what amounts to nothing more than sugar and water,” says Conrad in Natural Beekeeping. VIHC believes in using the honey as close to its natural state as possible and keeps the honey raw. Just like Volcano Island Honey, Dancing Bee Gardens also produces organic, raw honey.
Ross Conrad is the author of Natural Beekeeping: Organic Approaches to Modern Apiculture.
The various chemicals used in beekeeping have, for the past decades, held Varroa Destructor, a mite, and other major pests at bay, but chemical resistance is building and evolution threatens to overtake the best that laboratory chemists have to offer. In fact, there is evidence that chemical treatments are making the problem worse. Natural Beekeeping flips the script on traditional approaches by proposing a program of selective breeding and natural hive management.
Conrad brings together the best organic and natural approaches to keeping honeybees healthy and productive. Readers will learn about nontoxic methods of controlling mites, eliminating American foulbrood disease (without the use of antibiotics), breeding strategies, and many other tips and techniques for maintaining healthy hives. Specific concepts and detailed management techniques are covered in a matter-of-fact, easy-to-implement way.
Natural Beekeeping describes opportunities for the seasoned professional to modify existing operations, increase profits, and eliminate the use of chemical treatments. Beginners will need no other book to guide them. Whether you are an experienced apiculturist looking for ideas to develop an integrated pest management approach or someone who wants to sell honey at a premium price, this is the book you’ve been waiting for.
OPINION Loose Canon What Bees Teach Us I confess: I'm guilty of bee abuse.
Philadelphia City Paper
by Bruce Schimmel
Published: Apr 22, 2009
The real joy of beekeeping comes when you crack open a hive. You pull out a frame that's alive with bees, hold it to your nose and the smell of its honey is like a sunny field of fresh flowers.
Comfort a bee with a little smoke (like some of us, they enjoy smoke from burning hemp), cup her in your palm and she'll let you feel the beating of her tiny wings.
It's a good relationship. We care for bees and they make us honey. Along the way, bees pollinate the flowers that give us fruit and vegetables. Beekeeping's virtuous cycle has thrived for several millennia. Which is why colony collapse disorder has been so disheartening. One day a hive is thriving; a few weeks later, all the bees are gone, their unborn young abandoned.
No one knows why bees leave, never to return. Mites, microbes and viruses have all been investigated. But after years of study, we've isolated no single culprit. Unless you consider humans.
Beekeepers are now starting to see how modern apiculture has turned hives into virtual chemical factories — whose workers, stressed and overwrought, give up and leave.
The good news, however, says master beekeeper Ross Conrad, is that when humans start treating bees sweetly, they'll once again return the favor and stay. Conrad is something of a legend among beekeepers. In 2007, he published Natural Beekeeping: Organic Approaches to Modern Apiculture (Chelsea Green Publishing), which explains how he cut his losses to less than 10 percent. The book has sold some 12,000 copies — huge in the little world of bees.
Success, says Conrad, comes from treating bees organically, by emulating nature. Now, such a declaration might not create much of buzz, unless you happen to know how badly bees have been treated.
I know about bee abuse. As a beekeeper, I'm as guilty as thousands of others who followed standard, official advice.
When I started beekeeping some 15 years ago, state inspectors wanted to see chemical pest strips hanging inside hives to ward off mites. It was, even then, a desperate measure — since their initial strategy of breeding domestic bees with hardier Africanized ones hadn't worked out so well.
To pump up our now pesticide-drenched insects, we showered them with antibiotics. As a beekeeper, I bought whole baggies of tetracycline, the same stuff that human beings use.
It gets worse. Now that beneficial insects that once pollinated our crops have been wiped out by pesticides, bees are now routinely trucked hundreds of miles to do the job. And just as globalization spread disease among humans, our bees have been similarly infected.
But the real problem with bees, concludes Conrad, is connected to a greater human disease — a moral one. It's what happens when the abundance of factory agriculture takes precedence over the destruction it wreaks — on bees, crops and people.
Fortunately, in beekeeping it's becoming clear that making more and making it faster isn't working. That unchecked greed leads to a collapse — a truth that seems to apply to both beekeeping and to banking.
And, suggests Conrad, one antidote for unchecked human greed might come from what bees can teach us.
Consider this: Whatever a bee takes from flowers, it returns those gifts manyfold — as pollen, honey and food. It's a model that we humans might consider, as we try to bring a world back into balance.
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