Historical and non mainstream info

[Beeblebrox]

What websites and books do people recommend to learn about the more obscure stuff?

I find most books etc are mainly bloat, new stuff unique to that book can be compressed into a couple of pages or in the case of YouTube, 40 seconds

This comes to mind because I've come across https://warsaw-hive.com/ where I was pleasantly surprised to see plenty of novel things I hadn't seen before. It translates old Polish beekeeping books and covers things like tradeoffs of different hive types I was unfamiliar with, how to deal with bears, and links to other obscure sites. (Still trying to figure out why some hives are shown neither horizontal or vertical, but lying at an angle.)

There must be loads of obscure books and websites around but search engines these days are spammed with commercial links. Anyone got other reccs?

[warsaw-hive]

Thanks Beeblebrox for plugging my website, I'm glad you are finding it interesting.  It's still a bit of a work in progress.  I made the translations of books for myself, but then thought these are wasted not being shared.  Of course when you decide to make something public that creates a ton of extra work.  For example, I'm slowly reuniting pictures and text.

I guess the books will mostly appeal to the "sandal wearing, yoghurt knitting" beekeeper (of which I'm a signed up member of), but even if you can't be bothered to read the text, I highly recommend anybody just flick through the Polish versions of "Bee trees and logs" and "Work in the apiary" as they both contain fascinating photos of log beekeeping.  The photos are also quite poignant being taken within that brief rest period between the First and Second World Wars.  Both authors were killed at the start of WWII, despite (or perhaps because of) being a Catholic priest Ciborowski was sent to the concentration camp and shot by the Nazis, whereas Blank-Weissberg was taken prisoner and murdered by the Soviets.

Returning to happier things, if anybody is visiting Heligan this year they now have a beautiful Latvian log hive on display.  You can see pictures of it on the Natural Beekeeping Trust website or on the Oxfordshire Natural Beekeeping Group website in their review of the Learning from the bees conference.  I am very much in love with its horse gabled roof.  The ONBG website is a recommend.

It seems log hives were still in use in Poland in the 1920s and 30s.  So Polish beekeepers of that time and before knew what a natural nest was like and they sought out framed hives that could provide a similar environment.  One such hive was the 'Ul warszawski' or Warsaw hive from which the website and my avatar is named.  Such a hive will of course not be for everyone, but if you can't or don't want to repeatedly lift heavy stuff (e.g. you're young or the opposite) then I think it has a lot going for it.

One of its rivals is the Layens hive and I've also put the majority of Layens' books through Google translate too.  So if you want plans for a Layens hive they can be found via the site too.

Google translate does a pretty impressive job I think, but naturally there are some beekeeping terms that it doesn't quite get right.  Most of these can be figured out with a bit of beekeeping knowledge and common sense.  Some are quite amusing.

Polish beekeeping is my current beekeeping obsession, but before that it was Japanese beekeeping.  The Japanese Natural Beekeeping website is a good one to look at, their YouTube videos are charming. I want their hive lift for my Warré hives. Incidentally the Japanese hives have a similar internal width to the width recommended by Dzierzon so there is a bit of link there too.

[B1B2]

Deer can be a problem but bears? ?

[DianeBees]

There's some interesting stuff there!
I do like a cut through diagram of a hive!