Varroa Mites: No-Treatment is the Best Treatment

...any of the 4,000 species of native bees in North America such as carpenter bees and bumblebees. Most conventional beekeepers buy or breed their own colonies and queens. Backwards beekeepers collect swarms and remove and relocate feral colonies. When it comes to varroa mite these feral colonies have gone through a process of natural selection. When varroa arrived in the Americas, no doubt, many feral colonies died out. But the ones that had natural...

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Urban Homestead Book Signing and Lecture

...rban Eco-Villages and the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition present THE URBAN HOMESTEAD Talk, Slide Show and Book-Signing with Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen Thursday June 26th 2008 7:30pm at Los Angeles Eco-Village 117 Bimini Place, LA 90004 Directions at www.laecovillage.org Suggested donation $5, no one turned away for lack of funds Books sold separately for $15 Come hear the authors of the Homegrown Evolution blog and get yourself a copy of t...

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What Equipment do I Need to Keep Bees?

...on’t damage your equipment. Bee brush You use a bee brush for flicking the bees away so they don’t get crushed when you put the boxes back together. In addition to being polite, this prevents the bees from setting off their alarm pheromone and causing a stinging frenzy. Bee housing Like meany topics in beekeeping this is one that divides families and friends. I’m not going to wade into the controversy here but I’ll just say that you should go with...

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The Brooklyn Bee

...Howe argues that his honey is more organic than commercial honey since his bees pollinate plants in an urban location that does not have the sort of intense insecticide application seen in agricultural areas. Since he’s the only beekeeper in the neighborhood he knows that when he sees a bee in the two nearby parks they probably belong to him. Howe’s suspects that in addition to pollinating the local plants and trees his bees also collect pollen fr...

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Urban Homesteading: What Went Wrong

...es of future posts I’d like to look back at the ideas in our two books The Urban Homestead and Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World. I’ll consider both the broader ideas in the books as well as what might have changed in terms of specific methods in subjects such as gardening and beekeeping. First let me peel back the curtain for those of you have have never written a book and describe how awkward and weird it can be to read your o...

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