The New Beekeeper’s Calendar: Getting Started Warré Beekeeping

Reader Contribution by Lisa Gustavson
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Happy New Year’s! The beekeeper’s calendar begins in the fall. So, autumn is the right time to get started if you want to create a new apiary or try a new style of hive in an existing bee yard. Recently, more keepers are breaking away from conventional methods to try to establish a healthier beekeeping system. When choosing your beekeeping method, one of the first things to consider is the time commitment involved. In this post, I will give you a general overview of the annual activities associated with an alternative method created by a Frenchman named Emile Warré that is gaining popularity among organic and holistic beekeepers. 

The Warré (pronounced like soirée if you drop the “s”: wa hray) method and philosophy are more “bee-centric” than most contemporary apicultural approaches. In other words, since bees have survived without mankind’s intervention for millions of years, a Warré beekeeper strives to recreate a natural environment in which the bees can be largely self-sustaining, thus reducing the keeper’s role from manager to assistant. Simplicity is one of the most important principles of Warré’s system. As a result, this method is less time-consuming than most others. In my next post, I will provide a more elaborate explanation of the Warré beekeeping philosophy.

In the meantime, the following overview of a Warré beekeeper’s annual activities will give you a general idea of what your new hobby will entail each season. If you are new to beekeeping or just pondering getting started, don’t worry if you don’t know all the terms: over the course of the year my posts will provide detailed explanations of each of the seasonal topics, guidelines, and techniques mentioned in the calendar to help walk you through the process. You can also feel free to skip to the summary at the bottom of this post and come back to look at the calendar when you are actually in the process of getting started. Experienced beekeepers will notice that this calendar differs a bit from most other contemporary methods: one of the biggest differences is that the hive is opened as few times as possible to avoid creating unnecessary stress for the bees.

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