Urban Farm Handbook by Annette Cottrell

Author:Annette Cottrell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594856389
Publisher: The Mountaineers Books

OPPORTUNITIES FOR CHANGE

BEES

Buy organic honey.

Buy local organic honey.

Have a beekeeper install a hive on yours or a neighboring property.

Raise your own honeybees.

producer profile: Ken and Rebecca Reid

From the moment Ken and Rebecca Reid received their first beehive, they knew they were in love. Every morning at breakfast, Ken would eat his cereal by the window and watch the bees. When their four-year-old daughter, Evelyn, wanted to participate, Rebecca made her a makeshift bee suit out of snow boots, an old sun hat, and a mesh laundry bag. Evelyn climbed out the window onto the flat garage roof and sat down right in front of the hive’s entrance. She sat there a long time, letting the bees fly harmlessly around her.

These were conventional Italian honeybees, the same kind you can order in a box through the mail from California. They have evolved in symbiosis with modern beekeeping practices, living out their lives in standardized hive designs that discourage their natural instincts in favor of increased honey production. And they are reliant on chemicals to keep down harmful mites and fungi.

By the next spring, Ken and Rebecca’s bees were dead. Like those of so many beekeepers, their hive had been hit by “colony collapse disorder,” the mysterious cocktail of diseases that has hit commercial beekeepers so hard.

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