Warre Misunderstood

Have you ever done a YouTube search for Warre Hives?  You don't find a whole lot, but there are some.

What seems to be very interesting to me is the people who are advertising a version of the Warre "People's Hive" (which is actually the proper name for the hive, not "Warre Hive") seem to get so much information about the hive itself and information about Warre and his beekeeping management so dreadfully wrong.

It's like they read his book "Beekeeping For All" only to get the hive plans and then went out on their own from there.

The folks who seem to try to sound most informed about the hive and management system give me the biggest chills down my spine because I have made a point to read the book cover to cover multiple times.  They seem to get wrong more than they get right.

I originally intended to name names in this post but thinking more calmly about it, that really accomplishes nothing but creating drama, artificial as it may be.

The real point of this post is to encourage people to actually read the whole book.  Become familiar with all of the content besides the hive plans.  There is a lot of very good information in that book and the hive and your management of it really depends on your understanding the points he makes throughout the entire book.

Trust me, if you skipped a section, you really missed something relevant to the management of this hive.

I see so many "modifications" by vendors to the hive which they are quite proud of to make it more like a Langstroth hive in it's functionality.  Abbe Warre is surely spinning in his grave to see this happen.  They refer to such modifications as "upgrades" and "improvements"  but if they had really read the book and understood it, they would realize that Warre had covered many of their "improvements" relative to his hive design and did not consider those types of modifications as "improvements" at all.

I have no problem with making modifications to the hive design.  I have made my own modifications in the plans I build my "People's Hives" from.  The difference is, I have reasons specific to my beekeeping conditions and situation that make those modifications worthwhile for me.  Not to think of them as "improvements" upon his design or method.  Simply, modifications.

Overall, I think that not enough due respect is given to the Warre method, hive and book that people are trying to capitalize on now. I don't think these are bad people or anything at all.  Just a bit ignorant and improperly educated about something they really should have a better understanding of before they go about trying to sell it to people.