Modern Beekeeping

Natural Beekeeping

The natural beekeeping movement believes that modern beekeeping and agricultural practices, such as crop spraying, hive movement, frequent hive inspections, artificial insemination of queens, routine medication, and sugar water feeding, weaken bee hives.

Practitioners of "natural beekeeping" tend to use variations of the top-bar hive, which is a simple design that retains the concept of movable comb without the use of frames or foundation. The horizontal top-bar hive, as championed by Marty Hardison, Michael Bush, Philip Chandler, Dennis Murrell and others, can be seen as a modernization of hollow log hives, with the addition of wooden bars of specific width from which bees hang their combs. Its widespread adoption in recent years can be attributed to the publication in 2007 of The Barefoot Beekeeper by Philip Chandler, which challenged many aspects of modern beekeeping and offered the horizontal top-bar hive as a viable alternative to the ubiquitous Langstroth-style movable-frame hive.

The most popular vertical top-bar hive is probably the Warré hive, based on a design by the French priest Abbé Émile Warré (1867–1951) and popularized by Dr. David Heaf in his English translation of Warré's book L'Apiculture pour Tous as Beekeeping For All.

Backyard Beekeeping

Related to natural beekeeping, urban beekeeping is an attempt to revert to a less industrialized way of obtaining honey by utilizing small-scale colonies that pollinate urban gardens. Urban apiculture has undergone a renaissance in the first decade of the 21st century, and urban beekeeping is seen by many as a growing trend.[citation needed]

Some have found that "city bees" are actually healthier than "rural bees" because there are fewer pesticides and greater biodiversity. Urban bees may fail to find forage, however, and homeowners can use their landscapes to help feed local bee populations by planting flowers that provide nectar and pollen. An environment of year-round, uninterrupted bloom creates an ideal environment for colony reproduction.

Urban beekeepers are testing modern types of beehive, thought for urban contest and easy to use. In 2015 appeared FlowHive and in 2018 Beeing, a Made in Italy hive, that allows to extract honey without entering in touch with the bees.

Indoor Beekeeping

Modern beekeepers have experimented with raising bees indoors, in a controlled environment or in indoor observation hives. This may be done for reasons of space and monitoring, or in the off-season. In the off-season, large commercial beekeepers may move colonies to "wintering" warehouses, with fixed temperature, light and humidity. This helps the bees remain healthy, but relatively dormant. Wintered bees survive on stored honey, and new bees are not born.

Experiments in raising bees for longer durations indoors have looked into more detailed and varying environment controls. In 2015, MIT's Synthetic Apiary project simulated springtime inside a closed environment, for a number of hives over the course of a winter. They provided food sources and simulated long days, and saw activity and reproduction levels comparable to that seen outdoors in warm weather. They concluded that such an indoor apiary could be sustained year-round if needed.