Douai Abbey monk’s book alerts beekeepers to the increasing need for raising locally-adapted bees

FR Gabriel, one of the Benedictine monks from the Douai Abbey community in Upper Woolhampton, has just published Minding The Bees, a book about their beekeeping ( Northern Bee Books).

“We have kept bees at Douai Abbey since the 1930s,” said Fr Gabriel. “Originally for honey, though now our beekeeping is additionally an important part of the monastery's care and concern for the environment, along with our solar panels and our wildflower meadow.

“Our bees are kept free from any of the chemical treatments beekeepers usually add to their hives against the widespread parasite known as varroa mites, which usually kill colonies.

“We have not added chemicals for several years and our bees are developing tolerance to varroa mites and are surviving.”

Minding the Bees is written for anyone who wants to know more about the complex lives of bees, but also to alert beekeepers to the increasing need for raising locally adapted bees rather than imported queens and bees from abroad with the biosecurity risks of introducing new pests and emerging diseases.

Douai Abbey's apiary proves that there is a sustainable way that beekeepers can keep bees treatment-free and that they can survive the problems facing them today.

The book has already been well-received by John Phipps of BIBBA (National Bee Improvement Programme) and Dr David Heaf, who has written extensively about more natural ways to keep bees, both of whom are reviewing it for major beekeeping journals.

Available at: www.northernbeebooks.co.uk/

Fr Gabriel suggests in Minding The Bees – A Vision For Apiculture at Douai Abbey that the Buckfast strain is no longer the perfect bee for a world that has changed for honeybees and for us.

He questions Brother Adam’s fundamental principle that “the perfect honeybee does not exist” but needs to be created.

From this statement followed Brother Adam’s extensive Buckfast breeding programme in response to the mysterious Isle of Wight crisis that blighted British beekeeping just over a century ago.

The author suggests that we have been slow to learn important lessons from that crisis and from a century and half of bee breeding to 'perfect' the honeybee.

Mother Nature has taken 30 million years to perfect the Western honeybee, adapting its various subspecies such as Apis Mellifera mellifera (Amm) in subtle ways to its local environment. This adaptation continues through natural selection under pressure for survival.

For Fr Gabriel, then, the perfect honeybee does not need to be created; it exists already in the developing stocks of locally adapted bees kept treatment-free at Douai Abbey where he contributes in his own small way to minding the bees for the future.