Thursday 31 January 2013

Interview with Valerie Solheim of healingbees.org


It is the last day of January 2013 and my resolution to do more recordings has again been overtaken by other priorities - but here we are again with another Barefoot Beekeeper podcast.

It's been an exciting couple of days, with two of the UK's biggest retailers - B&Q and Wickes - announcing that they would be removing garden products from their shelves that contain neonicotinoids - and then a third big company - Homebase - announced that they were following suit.

UK supermarkets are now under seige by campaigners eager to press home their advantage and persuade them to take more garden pesticides off their shelves, so I think we have more good news to look forward to.

There was a session yesterday of the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee on pesticides, in which Bayer's representatives gave a rather lame performance, I thought. They looked dazed and confused by questions they seemed ill-prepared for - and then Professor Vyvyan Howard of Ulster University followed up with a calm dismissal of most of their arguments, leaving MPs - at least it seemed to me - in a position of little doubt when it comes to deciding which way to go on the neonicotinoids issue.

So, today's podcast is an interview I recorded in Denver, Colorado, last November with Valerie Solheim, who has some very interesting experiments running with bees.

This interview will be of particular interest to people who have considered the possiblility that there is more to hive location than just choosing a level piece of ground. Valerie suggests that we may need to take account of 'geopathic stress', as her findings suggest that the health of bees may be influenced by forces of which we currently have little knowledge.

I think there is still a lot of work to be done in testing her theories, and I hope some of you will be inspired to carry this forward. Valerie has just published a book about her work called The Beehive Effect, and you can read part of the first chapter at her web site - healingbees.org 

Please bear in mind that when I made this recording, I had already been speaking for over 2 hours and the ultra-dry air had given me a sore throat and an attack of the sniffles, which I have tried to suppress in this recording - but not entirely successfully.

Right at the end is a little more all-female close-harmony singing, recorded immediately after the interview in the hotel bar. 


Check out this episode!

Wednesday 9 January 2013

Learning From Bees: a philosophy of natural beekeeping


Need a good read about bees while yours are tucked up in their cosy hives for the winter?

I have just published a new book - only about 23,000 words this time - which is available as a paperback and in all regular ebook formats, including Kindle.

Here's the Contents page, just to whet your appetite:


Contents

5 Bees and Flowers: a Perfect Partnership

11 The Nature of Bees

23 What is Natural Beekeeping?

31 Balanced Beekeeping

38 The Importance of Drones

42 Do You Really Want to Keep Bees?

47 The Beatrix Potter Syndrome

55 The Bigger Picture

60 Sustaining The Honeybee

66 Asking Questions

69 Advice to Inventive Beekeepers

71 Inner Beekeeping

76 Learning From Bees

80 Ten Things You Can Do