So Im reading about bee barns and it looks like those are for non honey bees mainly? Is that correct? I use Warre’ hives because I do want honey but I try to do everything as aligned with nature as possible. I have a substantial organic garden and I use similar principals. I got very much in to the work of Masanobu Fukuoka and I try to apply his principles of working with nature to almost everything I do including bee keeping. My main goal is to produce almost all of my own food and have enough extra to sell at farmers markets to pay the mortgage on my property. Making my property self sustaining. I should reach that goal in one or two more seasons. Interestingly enough working with nature in a garden like this is substantially less work then regular yard maintenance. As I use cover crops and mulch, as well as Ollas for extra watering if needed. So it’s basically, plant seeds direct, then harvest when ripe. I can leave the garden alone for weeks with very little consequence and I want to bee keep the same way. Thats why Warre‘ is so appealing to me, I basically leave the bees alone, then weigh the hive to make sure they have enough honey for the winter and then harvest what honey is left. So I only bug the bees once a year, and boy does my garden like the bees! I admittedly have never used a Langston hive, although I do own one. I just don’t like the idea of constantly invading the bee’s home. I’m only a few seasons in, so I’m very new to this. But it’s an incredible world!

Granted I’m a super amateur beekeeper so I have a lot to learn but my understanding is that a Warre will help with mites because the bees will remove them themselves in that environment. Is that not correct?

The main reason this is an issue in the first place is that we use artificial bee hives (Langstroth hive) for commercial honey production. The hives don’t allow for bees to create hives in a natural way and therefor mites are an issue. And you have to disrupt the bees constantly in a langstroth hive so they are disoriented most of the time. If we switched to a more natural hive like a Warre’ hive the bees would be able to and will police themselves for mites. You get less honey but you only disrupt the bees once a year and they will basically take care of themselves. Once again this is a man made problem and instead of letting nature do it’s thing we invent vaccines. It’s kinda nuts really. Oh and PS bees aren’t native to North America, plants were pollinated fine for thousands of years here with butterfly’s and other insects long before bees were imported by European settlers.