MICRO FARMING HOW-TO: 
Researchers at West Virginia University created a natural bee source of supplemental food that appears to interrupt the reproduction cycle of varroa bee mites without harming bees if done correctly.
It was fed at the entrance and broodnest. It’s believed the nurse bees feed it to the larvae, and it eventually gets into all the communal food supply and then to the mites. Experiments that seemed to do the best at this writing used 25 drops of wintergreen, spearmint, rosemary or peppermint essential oils mixed into a pint of honey put into a quart jar, then filling the jar with very warm water (too hot evaporates the oils), and mixing well. More experiments are underway.
Problems for the honey bees occurred when the essential oils at the bottom of the feeder which hadn’t completely dispersed were eaten. True essential oils (vs. culinary or fragrance oils, which can kill bees), must be used. Straight essential oils can also kill and are too strong for the bees. Timing is critical and other ways of killing mites directly with essential oils for highly infested hives are being experimented with, and some results were reported. This url leads to further information: http://www.wvu.edu/~agexten/varroa/varroa2.htm#Revised. – www.microecofarming.com
Lemon balm
For a bee source from your own neighborhood, here’s an old beekeepers’ folk method for attracting a new swarm of local honeybees to the bee skep or hive. Rub lemon balm (Melissa officinalis) on the inside of the skep or hive you’ve built for honeybees right before the summer honeybee swarming time. This has been known to attract your own new colony of local wild honeybees. An essential oil in the herb mimics a bee pheromone that attracts them. Nurseries usually sell this herb in springtime. Grow it in a pot or a spot in the garden until needed to attract the bees.
Contact your local cooperative extension service for a local beekeepers’ association to get information on the precise summertime date bees tend to swarm in your area. Most beekeepers agree that local acclimated bees are the best honeybees you can get. You can also purchase the pheromone from a beekeeping supply company to attract local honeybees. A second choice would be purchasing a queen and colony from a local or regional bee supplier. Third choice would be ordering from a distant bee supplier. Before ordering, read up on the different types of honeybees you can purchase to make an informed choice (we’ll be uploading an article on that topic soon), and purchase from a reputable bee supplier that screens for disease. – www.MicroEcoFarming.com
MICRO FARMING HOW-TO: Micro eco-farmers can become sustainable beekeepers far easier and sometimes for free by using an alternative simple and natural beehive called the top-bar beehive (see video below).
The top-bar honeybee hive’s benefits to small scale farming:
- Build this uncomplicated hive with simple tools, free downloadable plans and recycled materials, possibly building a hive for nearly no cost. Free plans available here. These plans come through the online publisher “LuLu.” We have no affiliate with them but to get the free plans you first “register” with them for free. I always like to have a secondary e-mail address for situations like this, such as a free yahoo e-mail address.
- There’s no heavy lifting when beekeepers harvest honey and work with this hive so you can more easily add a small honey crop to your small scale farming crop menu.
- Multiply your crop yields with the pollination that comes with owning your own beehive.
- Experiment safely before going deeper into becoming a beekeeper. This low-cost, low-tech hive for honeybees allows you to experiment with whether you like working with bees and honey without a large loss of time and expense. You can then later add more top-bar hives or attempt to operate conventional hives in a natural way. The conventional hives take more honey from the bees, and therefore produce more honey for humans if you can keep the colony healthy. Here’s an affiliate instant downloadable book for conventional beehives and beekeeping with a natural twist – Beekeeping for Beginners. We especially like it because it discusses watering the bee colony, urban beekeeping, best nectar plants and other tidbits sometimes underused even by long-time apiaries. But it does focus on conventional hives. And one warning: When you go the page, it talks out loud for a few seconds. I’m still not quite used to that happening when I go to a web site.
- Have another environmental attribute to brand your farm. Many people know the honeybee population is suffering. If your small scale farming operation provides a natural and healthy home and habitat for honeybees, let your customers know, even if you’re not selling the honey to them yet.
- Create an agritourism draw. Micro farms often like to use agritourism – attracting customers directly to the farm – as a way to add revenue, attract direct on-farm purchases, and promote the farm’s name. An unusual and accessible “backyard beehive” can be a very attractive agritourism draw, either as a quick tour and discussion on natural beekeeping, or by putting on a longer workshop on building this type of beehive. Here’s an affiliate link to The Barefoot Beekeeper book, a downloadable, illustrated, latest edition written by the guy who offers the free beehive plans mentioned above, which really gets into sustainable beekeeping, top-bar hives, how to harvest honey and care for the colony in a natural way. –www.MicroEcoFarming.com
TRENDS: Please enjoy the video below on a 10-acre micro eco-farm in Jordan – and note how it became self-sustained and in fact continues to make itself more abundant even when left on its own. And for even more on this topic, please see our friend and colleague’s article on Greening the Deserts. We don’t need GMOs to solve our drought issues. — www.MicroEcoFarming.com
AGRITOURISM — TRENDS: If your small scale farming operation utilizes agritourism as a way to make money from the farm, here are four travel forecasts from AAA to consider. 1. Train travel is predicted to grow in popularity. With the economy troubles and airline travel safety restrictions becoming a headache, more people are traveling by train. If you have a “How to get here” link on your farm’s website (or even if you don’t), check to see where the nearest train station is to your small farm and let visitors know the distance, providing them with a link to the train station. 2. Nearby and shorter-term travel is predicted to continue. Make money farming by attracting more local and regional customers to your farm’s agritourism destination. If you relied on distant travelers in the past, hold a farm festival for the locals or write a press release on your farm’s B&B as a nearby get-away for regional customers. The title, The New Agritourism: Hosting Community and Tourists on Your Farm shows how to write press releases for your agritourism venture along with numerous ways to attract the local community. 3. “Glamping” is expected to continue in popularity. It’s a combination of camping and glamour. Mary Jane’s Farm in Idaho helped save her farm with this method. The wall tents in her orchard have quilted beds and pretty country furnishings in each tent with a rustic outdoor kitchen (there is a chapter in The New Agritourism on how she started her wall tent project). For the small scale farming operation wanting to just try agritourism out for a month or so without long-term commitment, this might be a fun possibility for the camping and honeymoon months of June, July and August only, then access afterwords how you feel about agritourism in general. 4. And “voluntourism,” the combination of travel with volunteering for a good cause or to learn and enjoy a new experience is expected to continue to gain popularity. The small scale farming community is especially good at this agritourism segment of travel. As two examples we’ve seen, a small vineyard invites volunteers out to learn how to carefully hand harvest wine grapes and discern if and when they’re perfect for picking and gets free labor for the trade; and micro farming families invite the community out to plant a row for the poor – which attracts the media, free publicity for the farm, and new potential farm customers. — www.MicroEcoFarming.com