Raising Resilient Bees offers a natural, sustainable, and replicable model for hive health and produc- tion, making it the comprehensive source for new and experienced beekeepers.
Increasing pest and disease pressure presents an unprecedented challenge for the modern honey bee. Hobby and commercial beekeepers alike continue to experience troubling rates of mortality for their colonies, with delete- rious consequences for the stability of our wider ecosystems and overall food security. It is time for a global focus on restoring the health of the shared apiary through naturally reared, genetically diverse, and resilient lines of bees.
Raising Resilient Bees translates these crucial goals into real-world practice. Authors Eric and Joy McEwen distill over two decades’ worth of beekeeping experience, experiments, and professional production to deliver groundbreaking methods in queen-rearing, varroa mite management, and Natural Nest hive design. Inside, you’ll discover:
With over 100 color photographs and illustrations, Raising Resilient Bees is the comprehensive source for new and experienced beekeepers, offering a sustainable, natural, and repeatable model of care for hive health and production.
Eric and Joy are a rare breed; professional beekeepers taking a creative and nuanced approach to commercial beekeeping. In their book ‘Raising Resilient Bees’, the entire cycle of the professional beekeepers life and work has been considered with a sustainable focus - from sourcing salvaged timber for beehives, breeding locally adapted bees, modifying conventional hive designs, to crafting high value bee products. Eric and Joy’s hard work and deep commitment to learning from their bees and the local environment should be an inspiration to any aspiring beekeeper, or those wishing to transition to more sustainable practices.
Few relationships are as complex, and indeed agonized over, as that between humans, honey bees, and our shared environment. This lovely book—a detailed guide, an homage, and a story all in one—offers huge insight to anyone currently beekeeping or considering entering into that great interspecies relationship with a view beyond the purely economic. Rich in detail, photos, diagrams, and the authors’ learnings—often from their own challenging experiments in bee breeding and care—Raising Resilient Bees conveys the McEwens’ love for bees and their admirable desire to ensure that the lessons from their good and bad times help others. We never do stop learning, and this book, part of a great beekeeping canon, will contribute immensely to your own learning journey.
Joy and Eric McEwen give a vivid, practical, evidence-based demonstration of how a commercial beekeeping enterprise of over 600 hives can work in a way that is more ecologically sustainable and bee-friendly, while remaining profitable enough to support a family and employees. Biodynamic and organic beekeepers will applaud the authors’ use of ‘natural nest hives’ with single-size boxes and vertically uninterrupted brood nests, populated with locally adapted bees and naturally reared queens.
Joy and Eric McEwen give a vivid, practical, evidence-based demonstration of how a commercial beekeeping enterprise of over 600 hives can work in a way that is more ecologically sustainable and bee-friendly, while remaining profitable enough to support a family and employees. Biodynamic and organic beekeepers will applaud the authors’ use of ‘natural nest hives’ with aRaising Resilient Bees is a must-read for any farmer or self-described naturalist with an affinity for applying appropriate tools and technology to achieve idealistic outcomes in agriculture, while engaging in such practice whole-heartedly. In this book Joy and Eric not only provide us with a bee-centric approach to beekeeping but also a human-centric one. As farmers, our impulse to practice a method of agriculture that seeks to regenerate our natural systems and resources rather than exploit them requires us to consider how to bring our whole human selves to the task. Raising Resilient Bees is not just a how-to manual on holistic beekeeping for hobbyists and professionals alike, but a manifesto on how we, as humans, can practice respect, humility and love, in service to the earth and each other.single-size boxes and vertically uninterrupted brood nests, populated with locally adapted bees and naturally reared queens.
Raising Resilient Bees shares the McEwens’ quest and commitment to steward bees respectfully and responsibly. From start to middle to end, this guide is a mellifluous manifesto that touches upon the diversity and majesty of what it means to work in tandem with our honey bee relatives and Mother Nature. May stewards near and far find inspiration and motivation in the McEwens’ path of purpose, and may they learn to nurture their own beekeeping journeys through the Diggin’ Livin’ teachings.
In this important new handbook, Eric and Joy McEwen provide a comprehensive nLe Fumoirlong-time practitioners offer detail and instruction for both the commercial farm enterprise as well as the homestead producer. It is authoritative, delightfully readable, and will be a lifelong reference.
Much akin to the wondrous distillation that honeybees perform while alchemizing nectar from flowers into concentrated pearls of sweet, nutritious and healing honey, Joy & Eric have distilled decades of earnest, caring and arduous work tending their apiaries into pearls of valuable wisdom. As a seed grower, I have long marveled at the unique cosmic dance between bee and flower that gives rise to the seed and this book amplifies this sense of wonder. If you are holding this book in your hands, then I presume that you too will be grateful for this valuable contribution to the art and science of natural bee-keeping.
Raising Resilient Bees is a comprehensive guide to beekeeping that emphasizes sustainable and ethical practices. Drawing on their years of experience as beekeepers and farmers the McEwens offer practical advice on everything from setting up a hive to harvesting honey. This isn’t just a how-to manual. This book also explores the important roles bees play in our ecosystems, the threats they face and provides guidance on how to support and protect these crucial pollinators. With its engaging writing style Raising Resilient Bees is a must read for anyone interested in beekeeping, sustainability and the natural world.
Beekeepers and the bee-curious alike will revel in this fresh offering from long-time honey bee stewards, Eric and Joy McEwen. In a conversational and approachable fashion, this husband-and-wife team gracefully offers up solutions to some of the most difficult contemporary problems. Beautiful photos and colorful illustrations provide both vital basics for those new to the craft, as well as creative ideas for advanced and multi-generational beekeepers to mull over. Opening this book is opening a window into a resilient and regenerative beekeeping operation. Your bees will thank you for it.
Raising Resilient Bees offered me a new way to consider honey bees. My previous framework was borrowed from Dr. Tom Seeley, who looked at the honey bee colony as a whole; something more than just individuals strung together. Eric and Joy McEwen have taken this a step further with their concept of the “hive bee-ing,” which is not just the colony but also the environment in which it is housed and with which it interacts intimately. I like this concept. The McEwens look at every aspect of a honey bee’s life in this book—pest and disease issues, living space, the genetics of resistance and tolerance, qualities of successful queens, optimal feeding, and seasonal management that fits the bee above the beekeeper. Resilience means being adaptable; finding new and better solutions to old problems. Adaptability. That is the best quality a honey bee, and a beekeeper, can have.
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