Ok you need to remember I am reviewing this book as someone with no practical bee keeping experience at all, everything I have learnt so far has been through books and you tube! This book makes so much sense to me (the novice). I am not sure if a more experienced bee keeper (as in someone who actually has bees!) would disagree, but one of the first confusing things you have to learn about is the different hive set up's, there are so many different ones and I am not going to pretend I know the difference between them all, but before I read this book we thought we had made the decision to go with nationals. Most people seem to use them and they seem to be the most universal, but I was struggling at first with why the boxes were different sizes, then I grew to understand that the larger ones were for the brood and the smaller for the honey with a queen excluder in between. I had just started to get my head round it all when I read the Rose Hive method, which just seems so much simpler!! I could understand the simpler principles of using this new method, the same size boxes throughout, no excluder as it is not needed, easier to manager as all the frames are interchangable and for somone setting up it is certainly a more cost effective way to increase your colonies i.e being able to easily divide a colony before it swarms. I even understood the whole thing about only using a strip of foundation on some frames to let the bees choose whether to make worker or drone cells, although drone cells are sometimes considered useless, what you are actually allowing the bees to do is act naturally and increase the gene pool, which then helps the population evolve and be able to defend itself better from some of the pests and deseases that have been taking such a devastating hold over honey bees in the past 5 years.
At the back of the book there is also really quite good plans for building your own Rose Hives it also explores all of the advantages and disadvantages to this system and from my naive eyes it certainly appears that the pros out way the con's. I am soooo pleased I came across this book before we started purchasing any hive equipment and I would certainly recommend anyone using conventional bee keeping methods to read and possibly reassess.
From everything I have read so far I think the only thing that has been established about the decreasing numbers of bees is that there are hundreds of factors potentially leading to their demise, doing what has been done for centuries doesn't seem to be helping, so why not look outside of the box, I think Tim Rowe has done that and in his mind has made some progress with his colonies and we are tempted to give it a go as well! No doubt I will cover more of this debate on the blog in the coming months.
Tim Rowe also has a very useful website here if you would like to read more about the Rose Hive Method (please do not take my word for it!).
Happy Reading!
The Hobbs'
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