The Idle Beekeeper

From building a hive to harvesting honey, a top urban beekeeper and shows aspiring beekeepers how to keep bees the simple way.

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Global bee populations have been rapidly declining for years, and
it’s not just our honey supply that’s at stake: bees’ contribution to
the pollination of various crops is essential to human survival. But
even in industrial apiaries—the most common approach to facilitate the
rebound of threatened bee populations—bees are in distress, hiving in
synthetic and hostile environments. Enter idle beekeeping: the
grassroots, low-intervention system of beekeeping that seeks to emulate
the behavior and habitat of bees in the wild—and it only requires two
active days of beekeeping per year.


In The Idle Beekeeper, Bill Anderson calls upon his years of applied curiosity as an urban beekeeper to highlight the invaluable
resources that these underappreciated insects provide and show how
simple and rewarding beekeeping can be. In this entertaining,
philosophical, and practical guide, Anderson teaches step-by-step how to
build a hive system developed to allow maximum idleness, harvest honey
and extract honeycomb, make mead and beeswax candles, and to closely
observe and understand these most fascinating and productive of insects.
Through his laissez-faire approach to maintaining a bee colony using
the minimum-interference Warré hives—low-tech, low-maintenance, and
bee-friendly hives that mimic the cavity of a tree, the bees’ natural
habitat—Anderson illustrates how little effort is actually required to
raise and nurture a thriving bee community. In fact, his idle approach
to beekeeping requires only two days of work per year—one day in the
spring, and another in the fall.


The Idle Beekeeper offers practical and philosophical advice for
getting involved in conservation efforts, and Anderson’s expertise will
show just how easy it is to make an environmental impact. For anyone
interested in keeping bees, The Idle Beekeeper is the definitive guide that teaches you everything you need to get started, even in a city, and without effort.