What's in a name? that which we call honey by any other name would taste as sweet.
I do struggle for not having anyone to work with to learn my beekeeping. Sure there is a lot of help available online and plenty of information in books. This doesn't tend to be too much help though when you pick up a top bar and the comb breaks off. What you want then is someone standing next to you telling you want to do not a glossary of terms. Also, it seems no matter how brilliant the forums are for support, there are still 101 different opinions to every situation. As such I am left with the constant feeling that I am just bungling along with the bees surviving in-spite of me rather than because of me.
I have joined a local beekeeping association to gain some local support, but all of them keep nationals. Contrary to what I know a lot of natural beekeepers experience, there is certainly no hostility towards my kenyan top bar hive antics, but neither is there any experience to draw on. The approach is entirely different. In my opinion much of the gulf is as a result of what is used as a marker of success for beekeeping. The consensus is the more honey you produce the better the beekeeper you are, the more honey a colony produces the healthier the bees are and the better the queen. This approach seems to persist irrespective of overwintering success and completely contrary to swarming. Swarming seems to be considered a marker of poor quality rather than an indicator that the colony has been sufficiently successful to consider itself capable of propagating. Until we can decide/agree on the best means of assessing the "success" of a colony and for that matter the beekeeper I think it may be quite difficult to find completely common ground.
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