There are 2 Warre hives in St Ives Community Orchard apiary. Both were installed in spring of 2018 by our beekeeper Duwayne Langley and the swarms moved in shortly after. Warre beehives allow a very simple, natural approach to beekeeping, leaving the bees mostly to live as they would in the wild without too much interference. Our beehives are mostly to provide homes for bees so they can focus on their important pollination work, with only the occcasional harvesting of honey as a side benefit.
Warre hives are designed to require minimal maintenance. There is no need to frequently inspect the colony, purchase an expensive honey extractor, use foundation and clean the comb out to re-use. It is a low-cost, low-maintenance hive design which simply involves adding extra boxes to the bottom of the stack (called nadiring). The bees move the excess honey stores to the top of the hive and so once the bees have stored way more than they need for their own consumption then you can remove the top box full of honey and add another box below.
We follow the principles of Natural Beekeeping which means that these bees are mostly left to live as they would in the wild. Honey is only taken when there is more than enough for them to survive on through the winter, so no sugar water is needed to be given to them and there is minimal interference of the hives. Most commercial beehives have frames with the foundation comb already there that is used time and time again. Some people believe that this is better as it makes less work for the bees as they don’t have to rebuild the comb after the honey has been taken. However it’s possible that the old comb becomes laden with environmental and agricultural toxins and that this unnatural foundation could lead to a lower immune system in the bees so they become more susceptible to disease. We don’t do any of the conventional beekeeping practices like using queen excluders, replacing old queens with new and treating them with chemicals to stop disease.
HISTORY OF WARRE HIVES
Abbe Emile Warre developed the Warre hive over 50 years of research, culminating in what he liked to call “The People’s Hive” in the early 1950s. He studied over 300 hive designs, ranging from straw skeps to the modern Langstroth hive, analyzing their ease of use and suitability for honey bees. He focused on simplicity, ease of management, and natural qualities including the building of natural comb (rather than pressed foundation) and the retention of nest scent and heat.
He frowned upon the invasive, tedious micromanagement of individual frames and combs as practiced by most beekeepers in his day. He found it optimal for bees and keeper that to manipulate the hive box only a couple times a year, rather than comb by comb. This is key to the beekeeping philosophy that corresponds with Warre hives, and it is a tremendous shift away from the common practices used today. Less bothering of bees means more productivity and less disturbance to the colony.
Swarming Bees
No queen stays in residence in the same hive for her entire lifespan, owing to the bees’ natural form of reproduction known as swarming. In a swarm – a wonderful and awe-inspiring sight to behold when the bees are in the air – the old queen and up to half of the colony’s inhabitants leave their home together and scout bees are dispatched to search for new quarters. The hive is left full of honey and ready for the emergence of a new virgin queen who, at the point of swarming, will still be developing inside her cell.
When bees decide to swarm away from their hive or home, the existing queen leaves with about 60% of the worker bees leaving the new queen to look after the remaining hive. This swarm can contain thousands to tens of thousands of bees and is usually a spring phenomenon. You’ll see first a mass of bees in the sky and when they’ve settled they create a large ball of bees, usually hanging off a tree. Scouter bees then go out searching for suitable cavities in which to construct the swarm’s home and will come back and report the location of suitable nesting sites to the other bees. Once decided, the bees leave their temporary location and head off to set up home. As there aren’t many suitable homes for bees (ideally a hollowed out log or a man-made hive), they will often end up choosing things like people’s rooves or cyhimneys.
If you have an empty hive if you're lucky the bees will move in of their own accord and this is the best way to get bees in your hive. Our first 3 hives (2017 & 2018) we collected swarms from places where they had swarmed in St Ives but in 2019 we had two swarms move into our hives on their own accord. In spring 2020 there were three swarms who settled in our apiary area but there were no empty hives to move into. Duwayne captured these and transferred them to local beekeepers.
Here's photos of one of the swarms that were moved to other hives.
A swarm our beekeeper Duwayne Langley captured