Top Bar Beekeeping

- click for more photos -

This site is about sustainable, chemical-free, small-scale, 'organic' beekeeping, using simple equipment that almost anyone can make at home. If you have not yet heard of 'top bar hives', then this is a place to learn about them.

You will find plenty of reading material here, together with a friendly and informative beekeeping forum, with opportunities to learn from experienced beekeepers.

Be sure to join our free beekeeping forum to share low-impact beekeeping information from around the world.

The Barefoot Beekeeper 2008 SECOND EDITION NOW AVAILABLE: 'The Barefoot Beekeeper' - A simple, sustainable approach to small-scale beekeeping using top bar hives. Now available as a printed book or downloadable PDF - click here for more about the Barefoot Beekeeper

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• Introduction to The Barefoot Beekeeper by P J Chandler (free PDF)


• How To Build a Top Bar Hive - free, downloadable ebook that gives detailed, fully-illustrated, step-by-step instructions for building the top bar hive described in The Barefoot Beekeeper. (This is the PDF version - see top menu for other download options.)


• Towards Sustainable Beekeeping - articles that appeared in the 2007 Beekeeper's Annual and in Beekeeper's Quarterly

• Cornell beekeeping library
• Smallholders Online
• Wholesome Food Association
• Green England directory
• The Biodynamic Land Fund
• Biodynamic Agriculture Association
• Agriculture Directory
• Katalog Stron Przyrodniczych
• Bayer Kills Bees

communicate!

• If you wish to send a message to the author of this site, Phil Chandler, please use the 'contact us' link on the top menu.


• If you wish to make contact with other organic/ biological/ top bar beekeepers, or post a public message, please use our top bar beekeeping forum (opens in new window)


• To register on the forum, you will need the VIP code, which is honeycomb.

"Without husbandry, "soil science" too easily ignores the community of creatures that live in and from, that make and are made by, the soil. Similarly, "animal science" without husbandry forgets, almost as a requirement, the sympathy by which we recognize ourselves as fellow creatures of the animals.""
Wendell Berry

Sustainable Beekeeping

From the perspective of the early 21st century, one can look back over the last 150 years and see how commercial beekeeping developed from the Victorian desire to dominate the natural world and subjugate its inhabitants to the will of man. This was the dominant paradigm throughout the first two thirds of the twentieth century, until we began to wake up to what was happening to the planet as a result of our arrogant assumption that we could treat it as a bottomless waste pit. Some of us looked out at decimated forests, depleted soil and polluted water and realised that we had collectively to change our ways.

The subsequent and currently rapid growth of the organic food movement indicates the beginnings of a shift in public perception, while the global dominance of a handful of agri-chemical corporations, intent on covering the earth with their genetically mutated organisms and chemical-dependent crops, represents the old order, stubbornly clinging to outmoded, reductionist science as their gospel and taking their moral guidance and business model from drug pushers.