Introduction to Natural Peackeeping for Gardeners Module 1, The Nature of Honeybees Hello, my name is Philip Chandler This four-part course is an introduction to what has become known as natural beekeeping which differs in some important respects from the conventional approach to the subject. Our focus will be on keeping bees for their own sake, rather than simply for the products of their labour. Of course, we also appreciate what they do for us and if there is a surplus of honey, we will be pleased to have some for ourselves. If you are already a keen gardener, you may have considered the idea of having a bee hive or two in your garden, but being put off by the cost and complications of conventional beekeeping equipment. In this course, I will show you how beekeeping can be much easier than some would have you believe, while costing much less than you think, especially if you can do simple woodwork yourself. In this first module, we will look at the nature of honeybees and how this informs our approach to natural beekeeping. Before we can consider any form of beekeeping, we must make some attempt to understand the nature of the creature we will be dealing with. The conventional approach to the subject invariably begins with pictures of individual bees. There are many books with diagrams and photographs of dissected honeybees showing how their anatomy has ranged and how parts of a dead bee appear under a microscope. I recommend you take a look through at least one of them, so you can have an idea of how all the bits fit together and what they do. However, as natural beekeepers and as observers of and participants in living nature, we are not so much interested in dead bees as living ones, and as soon as we decide to look at living honeybees, we have to think not in terms of individual bees, but in terms of the unit of survival, the colony. In a very real and literal sense, honeybees can only exist as part of the large extended family that is their colony. This family consists of a mother who we call Queen, although she is not a monocle ruler in any sense. Perhaps a dozen groups of half-sisters, who share a common mother but had different fathers, or deceased, and a band of brothers who are genetically identical to their mother and had no father. A rather confusing and somewhat unexpected picture, and one that we begin to understand only by careful study of their life cycle and unique behaviour.