Treatment-free bees (update 2016 October)

White Clover! WOW, what a great bee plant!

I have not been active on my blog for a while now. Sure I still keep my bees and they are doing great. We have begun to rebuild the old part of our farm house which is a huge project and still not finished.

That said I felt like sharing this bit;
I feel very proud at this time, and very happy for not just my bees but also for all the other insects benefiting from it. I have sown White Clover all over our land and right now there is about 1 hectare of clover blooming like mad :)  Bees, Bumblebees, and all sorts of critters are all over it feeding on ample amounts of nectar and fantastic pollen. All organic of course!

Here you can see part of the large field covered in White Clover.

This is the lawn behind our house (cant let my kid run barefoot, ouch)

 The bees in my apiary are doing great by the way. No issues with DWV at all.

 Bee collecting pollen from the White Clover flower

 I have sown one patch with Alsike Clover (Swedish sort of clover)

In the past few years I have been sowing all sorts of flowers but they either havent sprouted or did so in small quantities. Both money and time consuming. Instead of focusing on many plant varieties I now try to sow large areas which  can actually create large quality nectar and pollen for the bees. The first year we moved to Denamrk my bees had very little to forage after the end of Jun but now there is so much they can get from the Clover throughout all July :) So happy, so proud! Im also focusing on planting hendges with Hawthorn and Honey Suckle as well as Linden, Rowan  and Maple, all good for the bees.

All 8 colonies survived treatment-free

Today was the 1st official forage day of the new 2016 :) So great to see bees fly again and collect pollen.
I had 8 colonies go into the winter and all 8 are still alive and kicking strong :) As you might know I do not treat my bees with anything. I just keep letting the weak bees and varroa die and keep propagating the survivor bees/varroa in the next season. So far this seems to work well for me and my bees (and for the surviving Varroa, the one that does not kill its host) for a few years now.

I could see all 8 colonies bringing in pollen today which is a good indicator that they all have a laying Queen.

collecting pollen from early flowers


We have several Alder trees around our property and bees are busy collecting pollen from it at this time