A New Book

Finally, a new posting:

There has been no new material added to my website for quite a few years now; this is because most of my extra time for the last four winters has been devoted to finally writing a book about my apiary Champlain Valley Bees and Queens – from its very beginning until the present. It should be available within a few weeks of this posting, and my hope is that it will contain something of value and interest to both non-beekeepers and those with long experience. Now that this is completed, I do plan to follow up with a small volume focusing on the beekeeping work, and the annual routine that has been used here with so much enjoyment and success for over thirty years. But first there had to be a longer description of why and how these methods developed and still make sense today.

Work in the apiary has continued on, virtually unchanged during all this time. Varroa became a non-issue long ago, and no treatments of any kind have been used in this apiary for almost twenty-five years. As is the story in much of North America now, the beekeeping paradise we once enjoyed here is threatened by a genuine existential problem: the degradation and insidious poisoning of the environment — especially by the normalized practices of industrial agriculture. This book, Many Best Kept Secrets- A Wonderful and Unusual Life Around Honeybees-begins with a young person’s struggle to find a life that makes sense, and ends with an older beekeeper’s attempts to pass the wonderful vocation he found on to another generation in spite of the problems we’re facing now. I hope you enjoy it.

– Kirk Webster
March 2025