The association had Jacqueline and Susan, Washingtonians and authors of “What Bees Want”. They said we should share their web site that basically covers the presentation they made to the club. they are definitely “natural beekeepers”, keeping bees more for the love than the honey (although they do get that too, just in smaller quantities). Here is an excerpt from their web site;
Jacqueline and Susan have always kept our bees naturally, with no chemical treatments, using alternative hive styles like Warré hives, skeps, and hollowed log rounds. Intuitively, we felt we were on the right track with our colonies. Then, a few years ago, we attended the first “Learning From the Bees” conference in the Netherlands, hosted by the Natural Beekeeping Trust.
We were, to use a British term, gobsmacked. Suddenly—finally—here was the science to support all we had sensed was true! Dr. Thomas Seeley (Cornell University chair and honeybee researcher), and Torben Schiffer (researcher with Dr. Jürgen Tautz of “Buzz About Bees”) and a host of others shared documented scientific evidence that supporting every method we were using back home with our bees. Their research backed up all the goodness we could bring to our bees. The term we use for this style of tending bees is “preservation beekeeping methods.“
Finally, we found researchers exploring how bees live in the wild. Torben Schiffer said that studying bees in boxes and thinking you know who they are, is like studying a polar bear in a zoo and thinking you now know that animal. After hundreds of years of keeping these creatures close to us, no one had taken the time to learn who they really were. Until now.
In this website you will find the key tenets to a new kind of beekeeping—a beekeeping method that puts bees’ needs first—and creative ways to provide your bees with what they want and need from their keepers.
From WhatBeesWant.com