This journal will be of special interest to beekeepers who have for many reasons moved away from keeping their colonies in conventional ways, or who prefer their bees to be kept in hives more suited to the bees’ needs rather than for the beekeeper’s ease of management.
Such beekeepers allow the bees to live their lives with minimal interference. The bees build comb freely and swarm and reproduce with queens raised naturally rather than being propagated by the beekeeper via emergency queens.
Natural beekeepers also refrain from using chemicals for the control of pests and diseases and strive to create an environment in their apiaries and gardens which will give the bees at least some year-round forage.
Husbandry is the name of all the practices that sustain life by connecting us conservingly to our places and our world; it is the art of keeping tied all the strands in the living network that sustains us.
Wendell Berry
The editors
John & Val Phipps
Editor & Sub Editor