Our guest this week is organic beekeeper and gardener Patrick Pynes. I met Patrick through a comment he left on a blog post I did about Africanized bees. We talk about this subject as well as top bar hives and what it means to keep bees, as Patrick puts it, “beecentrically.” Patrick’s website is Honeybee Teacher. During the podcast we discuss:
- Les Crowder
- The language around beekeeping: “beecentric” vs. anthropocentric approaches to honeybees and “Bee-having” vs. “beekeeping”
- Dealing with swarms
- Golden Mean Top Bar hive, which you can see at backyardhive.com
- Africanized bees
- Aggression vs. defensiveness
- Top bar hives and Africanized bees
- Inspecting bees
- Advantages of top bar hives
- Eight frame Langstroth hives with foundationless frames
- Diseases
If you want to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please call (213) 537-2591 or send an email to [email protected]. You can subscribe to our podcast in the iTunes store and on Stitcher. The theme music is by Dr. Frankenstein. A downloadable version of this podcast is here.