Radical Beekeeper Michael Thiele Ventures Into New Territory

Thiele with an unorthodox hive--picture from his website Gaia Bees.

One of the lectures I went to at the National Heirloom Exposition in Santa Rosa earlier this month has really stuck with me. It was a talk by radical biodynamic beekeeper Michael Thiele that, frankly, I walked into biased against. But by the conclusion I could tell that the whole audience, including myself, left deeply moved by what Thiele had to say.

The reason for my bias was that I was not too impressed with the two other biodynamic lectures I attended. One was just too pseudo-scientific even for my intuitively biased brain. The other lecturer, when asked why biodynamicists follow certain unusual practices such as burying dandelion flowers stuffed into the mesentery of a cow responded, "because Rudolf Steiner said so."

Thiele was different. He is influenced by, what I believe to be, the true spirit of Steiner's ideas rather than the dogma of his followers. Steiner, I think, would want us all to continue to use our sense of intuition rather than rely on what he said to do. Thiele balances what we know from science about bees with an intuitive relationship with bees as a whole, and complex, organism.

Thiele uses an old German word Steiner also used to describe a beehive: "bien". On his website, Gaia Bees, Thiele defines bien as

an attempt to describe the oneness of the bee colony, [that] also recognizes its individual “personality”. The honey bee colony is one being in countless bodies. The biological term for this is super-organism. The bien is configured through the harmonious and functional relationships of all its parts. Every part depends on the other and all parts provide the necessary environment for their own existence. The colony is both a society of thousands of individuals as well as one super-organism, one bien.

Steiner's ideal farm, human being and society are also biens, approached as whole systems rather than as reductionist sums of parts.

Some other provocative points Thiele made about bees during his lecture:

• The vorroa mite epidemic was a blessing because it exposed the failure of our industrial, reductionist approach to beekeeping.
• "Let the bien tell us what it needs." In other words we should look to the needs of the bees rather than our own needs. Thus Thiele prefers highly unorthodox (from a modern beekeeping perspective) housing arrangements based on natural forms. One hive (home?) that he brought was a hollowed out log with a door on either side. Thiele believes that we should look at what feral colonies prefer rather than keep them in Langstroth hive boxes.
• Intuitive communication is just as important when approaching bees as it is when working with other animals. But bees are different. Thiele said that bees don't "have a face like a cat or dog," thus our communication with the bien comes from, as Thiele put it, "a different place."
• The hive is in, as Thiele poetically described it, "the aerial ocean," positioned between heaven and earth To this end he thinks hives should be kept higher off the ground as feral bees tend to do on their own. Indeed, most of the feral colonies I've seen in Los Angeles are between 9 and 12 feet off the ground.
• Thiele does no treatments at all including the essential oils that some biodynamic beekeepers use. He believes we should focus on the health of the bees and not try to prop them up.
• Thiele had advice for avoiding stings--"relax and focus on the bien" is how he put it. Oddly, I had a chance to try this technique just after the lecture. I walked over to a display by the local county beekeeping association (that Thiele would probably be horrified by) that included a hive in Langstroth boxes being fed sugar water and kept within a mosquito netted tent. Somehow there must have been a gap in the tent and a very pissed off bee landed in my hair. I did exactly as Thiele said--I relaxed and imagined the bien. The bee crawled out of my hair and took off. This has never happened to me before--every time a bee has made it into my hair in the past I've gotten stung. 
• Thiele believes that honey is a precious substance, a "medicine" and that we should "receive" honey rather than "harvest" it. He's horrified by the use of honey as a sugar alternative and would, no doubt also be horrified by all the cheap Chinese honey to be found in ketchup style packs in fast food restaurants.
• The bien can function as a intiatic gateway, as an inspiration for a vision of a healthier world. To experience this gateway we must look within and deal with our ego that is so neatly symbolized by the exploitative mentality of industrial beekeeping. Thiele described our ego as "a boy in the passenger seat of a car with a toy plastic steering wheel thinking that he's doing the driving." 
  

I have to say that several years ago, after I first began working with bees under the tutelage of radical beekeeper Kirk Anderson, I had odd, visionary dreams very much in line with Thiele's outre thoughtstylings. And I was never prone to those sorts of dreams until bees entered my life. It was as if the bien really did open some sort of new viewpoint or gateway. It's my hope that the same gate opens for many others. As Theile puts it on his website:

The Bien invites us to “see” with our heart rather than with our eyes. The extent to which the Bien’s “heart awareness” flows is seemingly limitless, is striking to us humans. It has the potential of fundamentally dismantling some of our core limitations and beliefs. The Bien comes as an in-spiration in times of great turmoil and change. Its wisdom and love presents an opportunity to step into the creative field of finding new ways of living. Living with bees is not about hardware, hives and such any more – it is about our survival as humans on Gaia, mother earth. Life on earth is at stake, and it is time to venture into new territory.

What Do Microbes Have To Do With Homesteading?

 

So what are the activities that microbes make possible around the homestead? To name just four:

• Fermentation
• Beekeeping
• Soil Fertility
• Human beings

Pretty important stuff. In fact, new systems thinking, applied to our natural word, is demonstrating that things like human beings are really just symbiotic sacks of microbial life. An article in the Economist, "Microbes maketh man" discusses just how important microbes are to human health:

The traditional view is that a human body is a collection of 10 trillion cells which are themselves the products of 23,000 genes. If the revolutionaries are correct, these numbers radically underestimate the truth. For in the nooks and crannies of every human being, and especially in his or her guts, dwells the microbiome: 100 trillion bacteria of several hundred species bearing 3m non-human genes. The biological Robespierres believe these should count, too; that humans are not single organisms, but superorganisms made up of lots of smaller organisms working together.

Natural beekeeper Michael Bush has made the same argument about bees. Elaine Ingham has emphasized the importance of microbes in soil.

Mess with the complex interdependent relationships between microbes and people, soil etc. and you're asking for trouble. This, for me, is the argument against things like GMOs, Miracle Grow or conventional chemical beekeeping. We don't know enough, and probably never will know, how 100 trillion bacteria will react to our latest innovation. Best to be conservative when it comes to microbial life.

Looking forward to seeing more of this microbial paradigm shift in science.

Picture Sundays: Bike Rack With Bee Smoker

Bike Snob NYC predicted back in 2010 that beekeeping would be the new fixed-gear. Don't know where I found this picture (Facebook?) but it looks like bikes and bees are achieving a kind of synergy. I think this is a custom rack just for that handsome Dadant smoker, which like the design of the bicycle, has not changed much in a hundred years:

Dadant smoker in 1910.

Does this mean that Dadant will come out with a titanium smoker?

Does the scent of compost make bees angry?

I think I've stumbled upon a strange phenomenon: the smell released by turning compost pisses off bees. Yesterday was the third time this has happened to me. I took a sting just underneath my eye and another one to my right hand when I was turning a pile located about 15 feet away from a hive. Coincidentally, the same thing happened to a friend yesterday: he got stung while working with compost near a hive. Ordinarily our bees are reasonable about living in a small yard with humans--they are not even very aggressive when I open their hive. But apparently turning compost near them is a different matter.

I look like I've been in a fight. Lots of Benadryl today.

I have a theory. Bees are incredibly sensitive to odors and use them to communicate. Their alarm pheromones alert the hive to predators such as bears and people. Bee alarm pheromone consists of many different compounds. Interestingly, a lot of these compounds such as n-Butanol and Isoamyl acetate are byproducts of fermentation processes. I'm guessing that a number of these compounds are present in compost, and that when you turn a pile the act releases a cloud of compounds that mimic the bee's alarm pheromones, causing them to attack.

It turns out that other lifeforms like to mimic honeybee alarm pheromone. Some species of orchids mimic bee alarm pheromone in order to attract pollination services. Small hive beetles, who raid beehives for their pollen, apparently bring with them a yeast that causes a fermentation process that mimics alarm pheromones. The small hive beetle's fermented alarm pheromone, in turn, attracts more small hive beetles who quickly overwhelm the hive. These sorts of deceptive, symbiotic and parasitic loops in nature really amaze me. 

As a side note, I've only had compost pile related bee stings at this time of year, when honeybee numbers are at their peak and pollen and nectar sources are getting scarce (summer is hot and dry in Los Angeles and not much is blooming).

If you don't have a hive, I doubt random, foraging worker bees would go after you if you are just turning compost in your yard. But if you've got a compost pile and are thinking about installing a hive--or vice versa--I'd seriously consider keeping the two as far apart as possible.

Am I alone in noticing this compost/bee alarm pheromone issue?

Digger Bee Video

This beautifully shot video shows why it's important to leave some of your land open as habitat for solitary bees like the digger bee.
Via Bug Girl's Blog.

How to Make a Native Bee Nesting Box

Back in the spring I made a native bee nesting box by drilling a bunch of holes in the long end of a 4 by 6 inch piece of scrap wood. I cut one end of the 4 x 6 at an angle so that I could nail on a makeshift roof made from a piece of 2 x 6. I hung the nesting box on an east facing wall or our house with a picture hanger.

I used three sizes of holes to see which ones would be most popular: 1/4 inch, 3/16 inch and 1/8 inch. All were moved into by, I think, the same native bee within days of putting up the box. This afternoon, when I went to check on the nest to take some pictures for this blog post, I was delighted to see a lot of activity. There were bee butts sticking out of the holes, as well as bees flying in and out. I think they are some sort of mason bee--extra credit to the person who successfully identifies the species:

They move fast, so I was only able to get these two blurry shots. No, they are not Chupacabras.

With the success of this primitive native bee box, I decided to make more nesting boxes to see if I could attract other solitary, native bees. I put this one together with some small pieces of bamboo that I found in a neighbor's trash can:

I think there's a great potential to create works of public art that double as insect nests. For a nice example of this idea see the "insect hotel" designed by by Arup Associates.

For general guidelines on how to build nesting boxes see this guide from the Xerces Society. 

We also have a project for a native bee box in our book Making It.

If you've built or seen a nice native bee box, leave a comment or a link.

Picture Sundays: Easy Ridin' Bees

To see how "backwards" beekeeper Danny rescued this swarm see his blog Bees and Beyond.

How to Prevent Bees From Living in Your Walls . . . or Welcome Them In

I love and keep bees. That being said, I'd prefer not to have them living in the walls of the house. Now, a hive can live in a wall for years and cause no harm--forget about the horror stories told by exterminators (they are, after all, selling poison). But if you have to remove bees from a wall it can be an expensive job if done correctly. I've removed hives from walls and it's both hard on the bees and the beekeeper.

Thankfully you can take a few easy steps to prevent a hive from moving into your house. Bees like dark hollow spaces--think of a dead tree or an empty stud wall. Here in LA many old houses, such as ours, have lots of cracks a bee colony would be happy to move into. Note the small hole I found on one of our walls that opens into an empty space between the studs (old LA houses often have no insulation).

So how do you keep bees from moving in? According to backwards beekeeping master Kirk Anderson., all you need to do is fill a wall cavity with a can of spray foam insulation.

Please note: do not do this if there is already a hive in residence! If that is the case, hire a beekeeper to cut or trap them out. Bees are very gentle until you disturb their living quarters. If you're in Los Angeles you can call the Backwards Beekeper rescue line. If you're not in Los Angeles, start your own Backwards group!

How to Welcome Bees Into Your Wall
Now, a more permacultural approach would be to design buildings in such a way to welcome bees into a wall.  Here's an example of a hive box built into a stone wall in India:

Photo from http://ranichari.blogspot.com/

There's a tradition of keeping hives in wall or niches in Europe and many other parts of the world. No need for spray foam or exterminators--just lots of free honey from your wall.

Bee skep in a wall in Kent, England.

Time to bring back this practice!


Note from Kelly: This might seem obvious, but you would be surprised how many people pay for bee removal or extermination and then do nothing afterward to correct the conditions that attracted the bees in the first place. Invariably the bees come back, because a house which looked good to one swarm will look just as good to the next swarm that comes along. Better, in fact, because it will smell of bees. Plug those holes and screen off all vents!

Solitary Bee Nests: Why Having Bare Ground is Good

Solitary bee nesting sites? Cat added for scale. Photo by Anne Hars.

Just as I was about to arrogantly suggest to my neighbor Anne that she mulch her garden paths, we spotted what I believe to be some sort of ground nesting bee activity. We found neat little holes scattered about the the middle of a dirt path. More appeared today.

According to Attracting Native Pollinators: The Xerces Society Guide to Conserving North American Bees and Butterflies and Their Habitat, 70% of solitary bees (not to be confused with honey bees) build their nests in open, dry spots of dirt. While I'm all for mulch to build soil and suppress weeds, the Xerces Society makes a good case for keeping a small part of your yard bare and thus open for native bee habitat.

In case these are the infamous Los Angeles sandworms, Anne plans on avoiding rhythmic walking in the backyard over the next few weeks.

Book Review: Attracting Native Pollinators: The Xerces Society Guide to Conserving North American Bees and Butterflies and Their Habitat

How can we save the world? Simple. Get everyone to read and understand the contents of a new book, Attracting Native Pollinators: The Xerces Society Guide to Conserving North American Bees and Butterflies and Their Habitat. Why? There's the obvious--pollinating insects provide a huge amount of our food--but they also have a few unappreciated roles.

Without pollinators, plant communities that stabilize river banks disappear. Mammals and birds that eat pollinated fruits perish. But perhaps most importantly, by raising awareness of the needs of pollinating insects we can better appreciate the damage we cause through the use of pesticides. Do we really want to live in a toxic world? A world, like China's Sichuan Province, so choked with poison that apple farmers have to climb ladders to hand pollinate trees?

And we're not just talking about honeybees. Attracting Native Pollinators delves into the fascinating world of native bees, bumblebees, wasps, moths and flies, providing a detailed guide on how to tell these species apart, what their nests look like and, most importantly, practical steps that everyone from a homeowner to a golf course manager can take to improve habitat. For instance, one of the most important things we can all do is simply to provide areas of open, sunny ground for pollinating species, such as bumblebees, that nest underground.

You'll also find instructions for building nesting blocks for native bees and subterranean boxes for bumblebees. There's also extensive plant lists for North America including both native and common non-native garden plants such as rosemary.

In our own garden we've planted a lot more flowering native perennials this year. But I'm also inspired to get a conversation going about creating more habitat for pollinators in public spaces. Los Angeles is full of space that could be planted with drought tolerant, flowering plants to replace the thousands of acres of lawn (mowed weeds, really) and Home Depot hedges. Think about the habitat we could create with all those barren parkways. Who's in to help? Let's pollinate a revolution.

Picture Sundays: The Dapper Beekeeper

From The United States Department of Agriculture Farmer's Bulletin #397, a well dressed beekeeper circa 1910.

The Practical Beekeeper by Michael Bush

“There are a few rules of thumb that are useful guides. One is that when you are confronted with some problem in the apiary and you do not know what to do, then do nothing. Matters are seldom made worse by doing nothing and are often made much worse by inept intervention.”-Richard Taylor

Michael Bush, in his new book on natural beekeeping, The Practical Beekeeper Beekeeping Naturally, begins with Taylor's quote, which could just as easily apply to gardening or many other areas of our lives. Yet doing nothing is one of the hardest things for us Homo sapiens to wrap our busy heads around. Nassim Taleb is fond of pointing out the huge number of medical mistakes that could easily have been avoided by the doctor having the courage to not intervene with some needless procedure or pharmaceutical. Up until some time in the 20th century, in fact, you were actually better off not going to see a doctor.

Michael Bush's The Practical Beekeeper is the new bible of natural no-treatment beekeeping. Bush's non-interventionist approach is based on the work of Dee and Ed Lusby and is at odds with conventional (beekeeping associations and academics) reliance on chemical treatments, re-queening, artificial insemination etc. Beekeeping, in my and Michael Bush's opinion, is one of those fields, like economics, where the experts have been thoroughly discredited by recent events--our current econopocolypse and, in beekeeping, colony collapse disorder. Of CCD, Michael Bush blames chemical treatments, directed at controlling mites and other issues, which throw off the microbial balance of the beehive. Bush's emphasis in symbiotic microbial relationships puts his work in line with soil scientist Elaine Ingham and the pro-biotic movement in human health.

The Practical Beekeeper would benefit from an index (something said of our first book) and some editing for repetition, but those minor points aside, this is a must-have book for beginning and advanced beekeepers. There's much good, practical information and I learned a lot reading this book on a long train trip. Bush has many interesting tips and tools that you can build yourself. And it's the few books I've seen that tells you how to do swarm captures and cut-outs.

Bush's website, The Practical Beekeeper also has an encyclopedia's worth of handy info.

Bee Hotel

From an old beekeeping book (thanks Steve!),  How to Keep Bees and Sell Honey:

This is probably the finest bee hive in the world. It was built by E. S. Williams, St. Petersburg, Florida, who spent 6 months constructing it. It holds two standard 10 frame hive bodies and a bottom board. The second story lifts off for hive manipulations. It is wired for 110 volt current, has window shades and curtains. The front plastic doors swing easily and fit snugly. There is a flag pole, also a sign, that is not pictured here. This has been displayed at the Kentucky and Florida State Fairs. It is unusual items like this that make a few fair exhibits stand out.

 Not sure the bees appreciate that electricity.

Backwards Beekeepers on CNN

Nice work Roberta, Amy, Russell and Kirk!

Backward is the new forward!

Bees love poppies

Meet the drones

Action shot! Check out those huge, beautiful eyes

I found this drone scrambling around on the ground in our yard. I don't know why he was there. Perhaps he was all worn out from nightclubbing. Perhaps the ladies in his hive had booted him out. It's hard to say. But I enjoyed taking a close at him, to appreciate the difference between him and his sisters, the worker bees, first hand.

Worker--Queen--Drone

Drones are longer than the workers, and a lot thicker through the body. Not so large that they'd be mistaken for bumble bees, but they're definitely big, husky boys. The queen is longer than a drone, but much more slender--and anyway, unless you happen to catch her mating flight, you'll never see a queen out and about. So if you spot an extra-large honey bee, it's a drone.

The other dead giveaway for drones is their huge, shining eyes. Drones have one function only: to mate with a virgin queen. Should one come by. And should they be able to catch her. So they have to be on constant lookout, and moreover, they have to be looking up at all times, because she won't be stretched out on a lounge chair, waiting for him to bring her a cocktail. She'll be flying super-high up. He needs those huge eyes to spot her.

(As an aside, I don't know why drone has become a synonym for a mindless worker (e.g. office drones). Drone should be a synonym for a highly privileged but ultimately disposable male, a male who lives off the work of others, his sole function to continue his genetic line, i.e, an aristocrat. I read a P.G. Wodehouse novel in which a gentleman's club--in the historical, English sense of the term, not the euphemistic strip-joint sense--was named the Drone's Club. And that was the best use of drone I've yet encountered.)

The last thing--and the coolest thing--you should know about drones is that they don't have stingers. They cannot sting. Or bite. Or even wound you with a sarcastic remark. They're lovers, not fighters. So if you've always wanted to pet a bee, don't be afraid to pick one up.

Erik has been reading up on the amazing, secret life of drones lately, and I hope he'll post about that soon. It will blow your mind.

Thirsty bees

Did you know bees need to drink water? They seek out shallow water sources like puddles and bird baths.

Even if you don't keep bees, you can help out our little pollinator friends (and a host of other wildlife) by keeping a bird bath or even just putting a saucer of fresh water out for them. You can do this even if you don't have a yard--try keeping a saucer of water on, say, a balcony railing or in a window box.

If you keep it full, and in the same location, word will spread and the bees will come and belly up. It may take a couple of weeks for a worker to discover the water source, but once she does, she will take that information back to her hive and they will never forget where it is.

Bees: Shown to the Children

Mrs. Homegrown here:

Homegrown Neighbor lent us this beautiful little book. The author is Ellison Hawks (what a name!) and dates to 1912. This book is part of a series of books for kids on various natural history topics, all titled the same way (i.e. X: Shown to the Children). I'd love to see the whole collection.

Every time I read an old children's book, I'm struck by the sophistication of the language and themes presented, and wonder why this has been lost, and then try not to despair for civilization. Take this passage about intruders to the hive, from the chapter called Workers in the City (in the book, the hive is conceptualized as a bee city). It's poetic and morbid and violent fascinating--all things I would have loved as a child:

Sometimes a mouse or a snail enters the hive, and then indeed there is great excitement. Imagine a great elephant-like creature, thirty or forty feet high, with a tail thirty feet long, to come walking into one of our cities, and you will have some idea what it seems like to the bees when a mouse is foolish enough to poke its head in the hive! But the bees are not frightened; the guards are promptly called out, and the poor mouse is soon put to death by hundreds of stings. Having made sure that the intruder is quite dead, the bees leave his body to the scavengers, who are confronted with the problem of disposing of it. If it were left it would cause disease and pestilence throughout the city, and it is too big and heavy for them to move. It is true that they might bite it into tiny pieces and thus carry it outside the hive, but this would take too much of the bees' valuable time. A better plan is thought of, and the body is soon covered over with a thin coating of wax. It is thus embalmed in a beautiful white tomb, which is made perfectly air tight. If the tomb is near to the door, and interferes with the passing in and out of the workers, tunnels are cut through it. Sometimes when we look inside a hive, we may see two or three of these little mounts of was, and we may be sure that each one is the grave of some intruder who had no right to be there.

Granted, I believe foreign bodies in the hive, such as mouse corpses, are actually covered with propolis, not wax, but I'm not going to hold it against the authors. First, I'm not sure if I'm right or not, and at any rate, the idea is the same, and very well described.

There's so much good to say about this book. It's illustrated with early photos, line drawings, and pretty full color illustrations. In somewhat more than 100 pages it covers bee anatomy, behavior, the process of collecting nectar, hive society, beekeeping basics and even includes a chapter on "The Ancients" which addresses the apparently long-lasting ancient supposition that bees are born from the rotting bodies of oxen (?!?). I'm wondering if that was more of a symbolic conceit, because surely the ancients were no dummies and could tell the difference between blowflies and bees. But it makes for colorful reading, and again, as a child, I would have been entranced. Even if I couldn't understand half the words.

Turns out this book is hard to find in the US because it's an UK title. There's only one Amazon listing, and it's $23, and a couple more expensive at Alibris, but lots of UK listings for less. We may have to begin direct negotiations with Homegrown Neighbor for this copy.

UPDATE: A reader wrote in to tell us the whole book is available online, for free, at the Hathi Trust Digital Library. So if you want you can jump over there and page through it. I'd checked Google books, and it's not there. I'm glad to learn of Hathi. They've got three other books in the series, too, btw.

A Taste of Honey - Story from the BBC

Gentle readers,

Mrs. Homegrown here. When we renamed our blog Root Simple we were making a commitment to build a better blog. We don't have the change all mapped out yet--we're letting it evolve organically (how else?) but one thing we've known for a long time, and that is that we wanted to partner with Eric Thomason and Julia Posey from Ramshackle Solid. We've long admired their aesthetics, the grace with which they live simply, and the way they're raising their boys: free and bold.

Don't worry, Ramshackle Solid fans: they will continue to document their adventures on that blog, just as always. Here at Root Simple they're going to liven up our game, dropping by with opinions, ideas and information that you probably wouldn't get from me and Erik, making Root Simple a more interesting place. At the same time, Erik and I will continue to blog as we always have.

So give them a big welcome! And now, on with Eric's first post, about one of my favorite subjects, the healing power of honey:

photo credit: edibleoffice via creative commons lisc.

The other night, Wednesday Feb 9th to be exact, while suffering a bout of sleeplessness, I had the great good fortune to hear this very interesting 27 min. audio story: A Taste of Honey (BBC)

It's a very informative news piece starting with the history of mankind's honey consumption and cultivation, discussing small scale vs. large commercial apiaries, colony collapse and ending with new breakthrough medicinal application of honey for aliments ranging from types of cancer to drug resistant staff infections.

One type of honey in particular, manuka honey, has very effective antimicrobial properties due to an additional compound found only in some wild manuka (leptospermum scoparium) in New Zealand.

Here's a statement from the Summer Glow Apiaries website:

In laboratory studies honey with high UMF activity (over UMF10) has been found to be effective against a wide range of bacteria including the very resistant helicobacter pylori (this bacteria causes most stomach ulcers), the wound-infecting bacteria staphylococcus aureus and escherichia coli, streptococcus pyogenes (causes sore throats).

If you don't have the time to listen or prefer to read, much of the health benefits being explored are discussed here in this BBC print piece from 2004: Harnessing Honey's Healing Power

BBC MP3: A Taste of Honey (BBC)

Santa Monica Legalizes Beekeeping

Last night the Santa Monica city council voted to amend their municipal code to allow beekeeping on single family properties. Now, legalizing beekeeping is a bit like legalizing sunshine. Bees, after all, do their thing whether or not the government permits it or not. For every beekeeper in an urban area there must be hundreds of feral bee colonies living in walls, roofs and compost bins. Nevertheless, Santa Monica took a big step forward, joining cities around the world such as New York, Denver, Paris and London who have aligned their codes with the laws of nature.

Santa Monica's amended code establishes a few rules:

• Beekeepers are limited to two hives.
• Hives must be registered with the City Animal Control Office.
• Hives must be five feet from a property line.
• Hives must have a six foot screen around them or be at least eight feet up (screening forces their flight pattern upwards).
• Hives must be given enough space so they don't swarm.
• Hives must be requeened each year.
• A water source must be kept nearby.
• In addition, Santa Monica Animal Control officers were given new clarifications on their search powers when conducting investigations.

All of these requirements make sense to me except requeening and the arbitrary five foot distance (you have to screen them anyways so you've already got a six foot fence next to the hive box). And I can't imagine how requeening, a practice I don't agree with, will be enforced.  I also hope that the Santa Monica Animal Control officers have the proper level of law enforcement training needed with their new search powers. And it's unfortunate that you still can't keep bees on multifamily properties (assuming every tenant signed off on the idea).

Quibbles aside, the Santa Monica City Council did the right thing. Now, what other cities will jump on the common sense bandwagon?