Wildlife Conservation United States Project #19782

Saving the honeybee one beekeeper at a time!

by Spikenard Farm Honeybee Sanctuary

Saving the honeybee one beekeeper at a time!

Project Report | Nov 5, 2019
The honeybees--way more than just honey producers!

By Alex Tuchman | Co Director

For honeybees across the USA and the world, the Fall can be traumatic. The conventional practice is to "rob" the honey stores from the hive--more than the bees would be able to surivie without--and then feed sugar or corn syrup so that the bees don't starve through the winter months. With the business of beekeeping, it is the bees who lose and the bottomline profits are carefully nurtures at the expense of the bees' health.

Honey is THE vital food that the bees need in order to make t through the winter months and come into spring with a healthy and vital immunse system. When the bees are robbed of their honey and fed sugar or corn syrup, it cahnges the pH in their metabolic system, making them susceptible to disease and virus--notable Amewrican foulbrood, European foulbrood, and nosema, which are directly linked to sugar and corn syrup feeding.

It's no wonder that the bees are in crisis! Luckily, we as beekeepers are empowered to make a difference once we know how important it is that we allow the bees to overwinter on their own honey. EDUCATION is the essential balm for the crisis we are in, and this is our mission at Spikenard Farm Honeybee Sanctuary. We teach, and practice, that the appropriate time to harvest honey is in the spring when the bees have made it through the winter months on their own honey, and when they turn away from the winter stores. This happens when the dandelion and the orchard come into bloom. This provides a great early nectar flow and marks the appropriate time to have the true surplus of honey--what the bees didn't need!

Your support of our work helps to bring these practices into the mainstream and gives more and more people the opportunity to become stewards of the honeybees and ensure their health and vitality into the future.

We deeply appreciate your donations and continued interest in this work for the bees.

Many thanks from all of us,

Alex

Links:

http://www.spikenardfarm.org/donate

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Jun 10, 2019
Humanely Breeding Healthy Bees

By Alex Tuchman | Co-Director

Dear Friends,

At Spikenard Farm Honeybee Sanctuary, we honor the gifts that the bees give us through their health and vitality, rather than greedily striving to get all that we can from the bees at the expense of their health. This is the central change in attitude that makes our land a true Sanctuary for the bees, and has been the foundation for our bees to thrive while bees across the world are still being exploited in the name of productivity.

But what the bees give us when they are healthy and well cared for: honey, propolis, wax, pollination, formic acid... These are all products of healing that serve humanity. By serving the bees, we need not worry that we will not be served. Service is the nature of the honeybee colony.

The greatest expression of health and vitality in a beehive is the swarm -- the natural reproductive capacity wherein one colony creates another. This rebirth, this swarm, is a remarkable phenomenon that inspires awe and wonder in the observer. For us at the Sanctuary, we celebrate these swarms, and help to guide these new colonies into their new bodies--into a new hive.

Thus, we have established a natural breeding program that serves the instincts of the bees and honors their health and vitality through allowing their natural reproductive processes to furnish our Sanctuary, and our community of beekeepers, with both new true queens (not artificially raised) and natural swarms (not artificial splits or packages). Because the carrying capacity of our land is ~25 hives, each year we have an abundance of new colonies that need new homes. By giving these to responsible beekeepers, we spread our strong, acclimatized, and localized stock into the community to help ensure the future of healthy bees in our region and beyond.

This breeding program, and all of the educational support that surrounds it, forms the crux of our service to the honeybee. We are so grateful to have you with us on this journey, and are always so very thankful for your contributions and participation.

Sincerely,

Alex

Links:

http://www.spikenardfarm.org/donate

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Feb 19, 2019
Building Spikenard's Capacity

By Alex Tuchman | Co-Director

Dear Friends,

Akin to the great gifts that 2018 gave us in terms of expanding our on-farm educational programs, in 2019 we are staying true to the core of our mission by extending our outreach into the world. We are now called to engage more actively with a wider audience and bring the message of healing our relationship to the bees and the earth to ever larger circles. There are a number of ways in which we plan to do this, and we need your support to make it happen! The activities that will spread the message of Spikenard further in 2019:

-Teaching a 6-month webinar course called Foundations of Biodynamic Beekeeping which already has people signed up from 7 different countries and all across North America. For people that can't make it to the Sanctuary but who are serious about beekeeping, this is a great place to learn our methods and join a cohort of other beekeepers from around the globe who are taking up sustainable biodynamic beekeeping. In partnership with the Biodynamic Association.

-Continuing to publish articles, and coming out with a new book on Spikenard methods of beekeeping.

-Building collaborations with national and international organizations with like-minded missions who we can collaborate with in promoting solutions to the honeybee crisis. We are scheduled to speak already at several major agricultural and beekeeping conferences in 2019, including the Virginia Association for Biological Farming Conference, The Biodynamic Conference 2019 in Lake George, Master Gardeners Symposium, and more.

-Teaching about beekeeping, supporting native pollinators, gardening and pedagogy at different Waldorf schools across the country, in partnership with AWSNA. Part of our educational mission is to help schools bring more awareness of the honeybees onto campus, into curriculum, and into the wider community. Planting forage for the bees is a great way to start transforming campus and ‘setting the table’ for the honeybees to begin a relationship with the students. Offering advice and helping to assess the possibilities for honeybee forage, native pollinator forage and housing sites, and bringing honeybee hives to different schools are all initiatives that we can help with. Giving talks and lectures to all ages of the student body, as well as to teachers, parents, staff, and other local interested parties are all often part of our school visits.

All this outreach activity means that we are taking on more work, and we are therefore in a phase of capacity building wherein we are growing our staff to fit the growth of the organizations impact. This year we are already in the process of hiring 2 staff and 4 interns:

-Biodynamic Farmer-Gardener, Full Time Year Round

-Marketing and Outreach, Part Time Year Round

-And 4 new interns who will come to work, and learn along with us for three month durations.

These positions will help to free myself (Alex) up quite a bit from the day-to-day farm responsibilities so that more of his and the other Co-Directors (Gunther and Vivian) efforts can be channeled toward the important expansion of our message to our greater audience. This, we hope, will also serve to bring more people to eventually come to the Sancutary to witness the devoted work for the honeybees and the beautiful flowering landscape first-hand.

Sending deep gratitude to all of you, and please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments.

Yours,

Alex

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